


Kurodani Yamame Has no Gods

by Reavski



Category: Touhou Project
Genre: F/M, Falling In Love, First Love, Human/Monster Romance, Idiots in Love, Interspecies Relationship(s), Interspecies Romance, POV Female Character, Romance, Romantic Fluff, Self Confidence Issues, Self-Discovery, Sins of Youth, Slice of Life, Spiders, Supernatural Elements, Youkai
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-17
Updated: 2021-01-20
Packaged: 2021-03-16 07:55:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 39
Words: 162,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28703256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Reavski/pseuds/Reavski
Summary: Kurodani Yamame has no gods… but she has faith. Moreover, she has faith in the reticent human male who is her partner in business, even if she finds his manner… confusing. As words are had and secrets spilled, an earth spider and a human learn to tolerate, understand and, finally, love each other for who they are. Then, of course, disaster strikes.(Originally a CYOA circa 2016 on THP.moe. Contains references to an earlier story in the continuity:Tenshi is in This Story. These are somewhat upfront in later chapters, but explicated on when critical; reading is not mandatory.)
Relationships: Komeiji Satori/Original Character(s), Kurodani Yamame/Original Character(s)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 16





	1. Somewhere, somewhen

**Author's Note:**

> Voting options from the original CYOA are provided for context/amusement's sake, with the winning vote marked at the beginning of each next chunk.

* * *

The crow touched down beside the chunk of necrotic meat discarded on the forest floor. The next moment, it was wresting for its life.

Underbrush churned, soil, feathers and dead leaves thrown up in bunches as the screaming bird thrashed around in a useless effort to shake off the attacker. Another moment, and its cries devolved into retching gurgling when the raw, purple tendrils wrapping round it found its throat. The avian’s tiny, crimson eyes began weeping bloody tears.

Yet having its nape speared through was only the first of the bird’s suffering.

The crow’s flesh was swelling and undulating, cracking the sheath of its skin where the rampant growth proved the worst. It rolled on its side, wracked by spasms, death fluids spraying or leaking out of the wounds in sticky, glutinous strings, its body devouring itself from inside, its cells consuming one another and reforming in a grotesque parody of genetics. Toothless, porous orifices gaped open with a _smack_ in the attacker’s excited form, and it was through those it began lapping up the liquefied flesh oozing off the avian’s hollowed bones.

An innocent onlooker may think it satisfied, twitching delightfully as it fed on the rapidly disassembling carcass.

An old fox, too aged to hunt, but not too old to register the death cries of a prey, poked its head out the nearby clump of bracken, its scavenger brain already gushing slaver out its mouth in anticipation of tasty leftovers. A spike of red, hyper-oxygenated flesh lashed out, burrowing in its chest cavity and pumping virulent poisons. At the end of the minute the animal’s body was no more than a broth of spoiled fluids and indigestible calcium.

A wealth of shapeless, heaving meat now lay piled on the forest floor among the wet dirt. Slowly, and the creature began to compress its naked mass inward. Then, a series of bizarrely deliberate protrusions erupted from its sides. The protrusions began to take shape, four of them thin and elongated, and one fat and rounded, at last granting the creature the satisfaction of a logical form. The longer ones split at the ends, fashioning first into fingers and toes, then palms and feet, muscular calves and forearms, and powerful thighs. Not unlike milk left out in the Sun, a coat of bubbly, viscous skin boiled out onto the surface of the muscle, curdling into a soft, creamy casing as soon as touched by air. The thing’s body worked jerkily, the still-exposed tissues pulling taut as it gave its sovereign attention to the final remaining extremity.

The fat globe of yet-uniform meat between the now fully-moulded shoulders pulsed and contracted in preparation for what came next.

Then, out of the fleshless chaos, the most complex organ of all began to abruptly take form.

Three words birthed from the infant brain, before it inevitably gave out under a blast of feedback from the newly connected nerves:

_“I AM HERE.”_

* * *


	2. Here and now

A stab of light came. Then, with a wooden _tock_ , it went.

A scurrying of feet on straw mats could be heard, nearing. Then those, too, did stop. Someone disturbed the covers on the _futon_. Something churned beneath them, tugging them back and begging five more minutes, or three failing that. Almost it settled on just one, when the covers tore away, went flying.

“No sleeping in,” said a voice, female and good-humoured, but brooking no disagreement. “Ours is the first watch. Come on, now!”

A human had issued from beneath the blankets, as tall and wide as a man grown, yet as sticky- and gum-eyed as a babe fresh from its mother’s womb. The pitiful occupier of the now-naked bed gave an equally pitiful whimper. Then he curled up in a foetal position, and went back to sleep.

Yamame Kurodani, her patience drawing – not quite straining, but drawing all the same – leaned down, and allowed her upper lip to curl over her fangs. She lowered still on a second thought, pushing unruly hair behind one ear, until its longest strands pooled on the beddings.

Then, she whispered:

“I’ll bite.”

The man – if this had indeed been his intent – made an expertly impression of a landed fish. One flop and he was off the mattress. Another, and he was across the room. Yet another, and he was banging the back of his head on the far wall.

There was no accusation in his stare when Yamame looked. Only a dim apprehension – the stripe which may be seen at a dinner table, when a singularly obscure ingredient is named. Yamame returned to her full height, smiling at the mischief. The man’s expression, as well, softened – by degrees.

The last time she had delivered on the threat – and it was a deserved one – had consigned him to bed for a full fortnight, threaded through with sights and experiences neither of them wished repeated. They both knew this. None of it stayed the ritual from happening. Yamame Kurodani was a monster. An _earth spider_. The deadliest maladies bent to her whim at the tip of a finger; any threat issued by Yamame was akin to thunder rumbling on the horizon. Too far to be an immediate danger; too close still to leave the air undisturbed.

Yet most importantly, Yamame Kurodani was an easily tickled creature. And tickle she did. Unable to hold herself in check any longer, the most dreaded of Underworld’s spinstresses split at the seams with tumultuous laughter.

“You looked like you’d seen a hungry bear!” she managed to snort out. Then, wiping the tears from her acid yellow eyes, she began for the door. “Wash your doe face and join me outside. We’re turning the project in today.”

The man confirmed. Never speaking, never releasing a motion in excess; but he made a faint nod, and that was reply enough. Yamame laughed once more, as she was wont to do. Then she was gone.

They were this kind of pair.

* * *

Once, the dark underground passage may have been jagged and treacherous. Now, gentle steps had been graven in the floor, climbing ever upwards in a perfect basalt row. With each taken, the hem of Yamame’s earthen dress bounced jauntily up and down.

No lanterns lit the way here, nor did the absence of alcoves or torch-rings attest to the opposite ever being the case before; for these were tunnels hewn by and for the Underworld’s builders, who were of preternatural sight. Still the man walking behind Yamame did not stumble, or fall. Long days (or were they, in a realm without Sun?) bidden in the underground had accustomed his human eyes to the dark; even now they picked out the outlines of each next step almost as surely as Yamame’s. Where they failed, where the dress had last bounced proved the next best indicator.

Though scarcely had five minutes melted into the damp underground air, already Yamame was bubbling with impatient humour. A few more steps and it spilled over, and Yamame half-twisted round to look at the one following her up the slope.

“You’re as talkative as I’ve known you,” she said, mock-despairingly. “A real chatterbox! What’s wrong, now? Nervous? It’s my project, not yours, you know. All you need to do is hand it over. I’ll be the one bearing the brunt of criticism.”

The human peered up, offering an apologetic smile, but nothing else.

Yamame rolled her eyes, unseriously. “Those beams for the roof were lop-sided, too,” she complained. “Me and the girls had to cut them down to rights. This left us some space short, of course. Altogether exasperating. Well, it all worked out in the end – or, rather, we _made_ it work out. Whatever matter that makes.” She was fully turned now, walking backwards and animating every sentence with a swing this way, or a toss that one. “All of this could have been avoided, you know. Had we been allowed to use our own material, for one. Well, right, the costs would have been a world above, and let’s not forget the lease rights to logging to boot. I get that much. And even I haven’t seen that many trees growing underground, so that’s one solution out of the picture, but… Something else, perhaps? What do we get down here, again? Mushrooms? Mushrooms could do, right? There are caverns below where they grow as tall as the tallest trees. The stems could be dried, married to some bonding agent… The colour would leave something to be desired, of course. Nothing a touch of paint couldn’t mend, though. The caps could be sold to brewers in the capital. There’s another brand of magic those folks can do with a—”

“Kurodani.”

Yamame almost startled. “Yes? That’s my family name. What about it?”

A flicker of another smile passed over the human’s face. Then a stern expression came on, and it seemed no more than a trick of the dark.

“You will trip,” he said.

 _Now_ Yamame almost did. She caught the next step and glared down at the man. “Excuse me? Trip? I?”

He inclined his head, a picture of seriousness. “Trip. You.”

“You are joking!” Yamame _humph_ ed. “Have you ever known a spider to trip? In case you’d forgotten, spiders have eight legs – eight! Methinks I can manage two just right, thank you very much.” The spinstress muttered on. “Trip! What a ridiculous idea. Can you imagine a spider _tripping_ on its web? It’d be a death sentence! No, forget that, we are skirting round the core of the issue here. Spiders aren’t _designed_ to trip in the first place! What else but our innate coordination did you think enabled us to build things with our speed? A spider who trips is no spider at all. It’s a… a _nay-_ der! That’s our own truth. Our crafts would have collapsed in on themselves if… they…” The outpour of wounded pride tapered down and broke when Yamame noticed the human rummaging through one of the bags hung from his shoulders. “What are you doing?”

The man continued for a second, before, never answering, he extracted from the bag a chunk of sweet bread wrapped in fatigued paper. He removed the wrapper, gingerly. Then he tore the chunk in two, presenting one half to Yamame. Without thinking, the spinstress received the treat.

“Oh, cheers.”

The human’s fingers were cold when hers brushed them.

All but she had stuffed her mouth with the food, when a realisation appeared to her mind that squeezed her brows together in a silken frown. Yamame looked first to the bread, then to the human – watching her in anticipation.

“Hooold on,” she said. “Are you trying to shut me up?”

The human shrugged. Then he bit into his share of bread, and delegated his eyes to studying the polished walls.

Yamame _had_ to laugh. So she did. Her voice barraged up and down the tunnel, carrying in all likelihood all the way to the underground capital.

“Very well, you snake!” she surrendered, somehow. “Very well. I won’t bother you anymore.” She sucked in a shivery breath. Then, as if sensing a change oncoming, her nose wrinkled, sniffing at the gradually warming air. “Ah. We’re coming up on the exit soon.”

Once more, Yamame looked to the human, who had – as he always did – kept his true feelings beneath the enigmatic smile he seemed to have reserved for her fooling.

For an abstracted moment, Yamame stared him down. For a moment, she wondered what this human did in her company, and how exactly it had come he had been stranded in the Underworld. For a moment, she questioned what she felt about this circumstance – about _him_ – and what had become of her terrible reputation.

 _No,_ she thought, with an ache in her chest she had naïvely imagined forgotten. The reputation was _still there_. _This_ was why the human yet remained. This was why his mediation had been welcomed.

This was why she could still wake smiling today.

Yamame sighed, just weakly enough for it to miss the human’s dull hearing. Then, she began undoing one of the sashes fashioned into her dress in the like of an obsidian spider web. Her seasoned fingers picked at the loops until the sash slid free.

Indulging a stray and fatuous idea, she brought it shortly to her lips, before holding it out to the man.

“Just a blessing,” she explained, with a wink. “Cover your eyes now. As much priestly as it’d be, we don’t want you going blind… my _devoted servant_.”

* * *

“About as good as it can be,” Yamame appraised, podiumed illustriously on the porch of the newly raised shrine.

The Sun had long concluded its cresting of the sky by the time they met again at the site of Yamame’s most recent work. An hour had passed for the human – and it had been an hour laden with sweat and the pestering of summer insects – since they had split at the mouth of the tunnel; but for Yamame, the same time had been spent in a dash.

After she had flown to their destination (and left the grounded human to arrive on his own time), Yamame had positively hurled into a torrent of minute examinations, adjustments, and finishing touches on the sanctuary she – together with her associates – had hammered from raw wood and wrought iron in the space of previous days. To the credit of herself – as well as said associates – there had not been very many. Still few crafts are given to revealing their flaws immediately upon completion, and Yamame’s had proven no different that day.

The human threw down the handle of the pushcart he had, appropriately, pushed here from the secret entrance to the Underworld, and surveyed the freshly tidied grounds around the shrine. The action appeared comedic at least to Yamame’s mind, since the man remained blindfolded in order to protect his maladapted eyes, so she was chuckling as she hopped from the platform (where she had stood admiring her work) down to the recently upraised and repacked dirt. This was nothing out of the rule, and met with no reaction from the human. Though Yamame was sure he had seen her move, even through the sash wound around his head.

A reaction did come, but only after she asked, “When are we meeting our contractor?”

The blindfolded head rotated, with difficulty – as though on a rusted pivot. Yamame knew the answer even before the sweat-drenched lower half of her helper’s face opened its mouth to vocalise it.

“We?” repeated the man. Then, processing what had been said, he added, “… When the Sun crowns the Goddesses’ Mount.”

“How poetic. Which is?”

“Not long.”

“You’re the poet here,” Yamame gave up. “I’ll hold you to that, then.”

She had no sooner made about to return to the porch, than the human’s rare voice stopped her. “Kurodani.”

“You’ve confirmed that one already,” Yamame groaned, irritating against her best effort. “It _is_ my family name. What about it?”

“We?”

 _Oh, I had expected this,_ she thought. Which nonetheless did nothing for her humour souring.

Yet just as fully as Yamame wished the man’s dogged insistence crushed and blown in his face, she knew he had in fact a wealth of reasons. Good, practical reasons, all for wanting her precluded from negotiations, once the other humans – ones who had commissioned the shrine – arrived to claim. The sort of reasons – to the letter – which Yamame hated the most.

Yamame wrenched around – on her own rusted pivot – and found herself recipient of an unseeing stare. There _were_ eyes staring at her from beneath the fabric of the blindfold – of this she was roughly certain. Still, being unable to read them dropped a stone of weakness into the pit of her stomach.

Yamame wanted to stay. She knew she _should not_ , but wanted it all the same. An all-too-common dilemma.

( ) She stayed.  
( ) She spied from afar.


	3. Chapter 3

(X) She spied from afar.

Yamame shut her eyes.

A full minute had buzzed by on cricket wings before Yamame discovered she had not as much _shut_ them as _clamped_ them shut, and her brows were beginning to hurt. So she unclamped them. The irises of her eyes constricted at the returned light.

There was little light _in_ those eyes, however, when Yamame gave their full slit-pupilled favour to the cause of their gymnastics. The human had endured in the same faintly disapproving pose, putting no effort toward differentiating himself from a man-shaped root, grown out from the middle of the shrine grounds and poised to stumble. Stumble Yamame – if nobody else. _And did I not boast my species’ impeccable control earlier today?_ she thought miserably. To her resigned amusement, she reasoned words meant scarce little to roots anyway.

“Very good,” Yamame breathed, and her helper became just that touch less like a statue. “Very good… you snake. I’ll leave you to your entertainment.”

“… Very good.”

Had it been a reply, or a mockery of her capitulation? But Yamame knew this language, and it was that of indignation; and the real snake was the one in her craw, writhing. The spinstress willed it down, if only for an instant. She had a man to play.

“ _Your_ welfare hangs on this as well, you know,” she said, propping her hands on her hips. “You are confident you won’t cry ‘Yamame!’ when they start pointing out details? Asking questions? Griping about those beams? Maybe I should stay nearby just in case, hmm?”

“ _Trust_ me,” said the human – with rather more conviction than she had prepared for.

Yamame’s jaw unlocked to release more hollow doubts to the midday air, but just as soon it _clack_ ed back close. Slowly, and the doubts shrivelled up and suffocated – one by one. Yamame’s arms drooped along her sides. This time she managed to speak.

“I do,” she murmured. “I _do_ trust you.”

The scariest part was, she had absolutely meant it.

Had this human been any more inflexible than he already was, he may well have been a needle stuck in a lock. _Or a twig stuck in a web,_ Yamame cringed inside. The nod he was now slowly producing already seemed a huge concession on his part. Another time, and Yamame would have been of a mind to help it along. Now, she remained at a safe half of one. At any rate she would be yanking his head down later, if it proved her trust had been misplaced.

With a confused sense of disappointment, she realised the chances for that were slim.

“So then,” she said, looking off to the side at nothing that would appear significant to a human, “we will meet somewhere along the way, yes? Somewhere on the road. No worries, I’ll stay off of it so as not to run into our benefactors.”

“Very good.”

Almost she responded with a smirk. “Guess it’s out of my hands now, huh? Well. It’s your show from now on, then.” The smirk mellowed out to a smile, and this Yamame safely gave to her human. “You do me good now, hear? This might be just another shrine to you, but it is a heart’s child to me. I want her new parents to be proud of her, too.”

“Yes,” he replied. “I understand.”

 _Now this I don’t believe._ “Give it your best,” she told him all the same, “and there’s a hug in it for you.”

Had Yamame been anyone else, she could have wounded at the twisting of the man’s mouth.

Yet Yamame was nobody if not herself, and she rewarded it the same way she did most things which didn’t either cause her to run or start fighting.

Cackling still, she loped off out under the shrine’s _torii_ gateway.

* * *

The instance the trees had taken her from the human’s sight, she broke around in a tight arc.

A spider did not live as long as Yamame had without learning the importance of surrounding geography, and Yamame had lived longer than she cared to confess anywhere but in front of a mirror. Trees were pecking and grasping at the fluttering skirts of her dress as she zoomed past; only Yamame’s supernatural awareness stayed her from becoming caught in their net. That, or a wet, crimson splatter on one of the ageless trunks.

The instincts held, and within the minute Yamame had arrived before a tree different from most surrounding it. Thicker it was – this much readily apparent – but taller as well, Yamame already knew, and thusly ideal for her purpose. There was little speed to be had in her careful journey up the tree – secrecy being an issue at this stage – but sooner than she could second-guess the minutiae of her plan, the spinstress was poking her curious head out from the highest clumps of leaves. The dizzying height meant nothing to a spider – even less to a spider who flew as well as spun – and Yamame had but to look around to find she had a clear view of the shrine.

Her human, of course, was there. Two, perhaps three tosses of a stone away, he stood immobile in the heart of the shrine grounds, his blindfolded gaze focused on the _torii_ gate through which Yamame had left. An unknowable end (as well as source) had in Yamame’s brief absence placed in his hand a long, wooden pole, almost as tall as the man himself. A staff perhaps, or another sort of utility stick, the pole was stout at the end he kept smothered in the dirt; but toward the top it tapered out, rounding off with a gnarled, distorted bit – as though the branch had fallen ill at that point, and had had to be aborted. Yamame was reminded of those ceremonial sceptres wielded by the priests and priestesses of the realm; yet to what satisfaction her own priest required proof of his power beyond dealing with the earth spiders and living to tell the tale – Yamame couldn’t begin to guess.

As the afternoon lazily unrolled over the land, and the human never moved, though – she allowed her thoughts to wander.

The previous few days had been trying. Never more trying than today – but when today had had Yamame submit to a human, there was plenty of trying below available. The beams – which even now remained a thorn in her side – were but the opening of the blow hole. Yamame had never considered who her employer was – such details both beneath her notice and the sparse vocabulary of her helper – but the reality was plain the person who had ordered and provided material for the shrine was not one about to sleep with a bill longer than his nose. Two bags of nails from the five trundled up to the build site had been rusted; meshes for the panels meant to become the shrine’s sliding walls had borne the sour tinge of a few months’ mould; and had Yamame and her co-workers not been wedded to their own tools, they would have been left using their teeth and fists to hammer in the nails and saw the wood. _Maybe,_ Yamame thought, _maybe it is good I left._ Other than… the _other reasons_ to be gone, Yamame had a mouthful of acid to be spat at whoever had conceived mouldy was the new architectural mode.

And a pool of goo did not pay as well as a person, however miserly.

As she was chuckling at the picture, all of a sudden Yamame realised a team of humans had turned out from the forest without her notice, and was now filing into the clearing. A procession of menials and servitors – labouring at carts laden with packaged goods, as well as ones tossed haphazardly onto piles to be moved to the new sanctuary – was approaching Yamame’s helper, who stood to meet them on what he must have deemed neutral ground. Headed by a stately woman – the matriarch, Yamame guessed – and her husband, the column halted within prudent twenty paces of the staff-wielding man.

Words were exchanged.

Then, Yamame’s human tapped the foot of his staff on the ground three measured times.

Then, the matriarch’s husband (to Yamame’s surprise, not the matriarch herself) approached with an extended arm. The two men clasped hands, wagging them like so up and down another three times – too precise to be accidental. Tension in the clearing, however tentative it had been to begin with, seemed to snap and vanish at the completion of this ritual; and the leader of the arrived humans motioned at the others to resume their work. The servants began moving again, scattering round the grounds in the sort of organised chaos their stripe did, while Yamame’s human spoke with their lord.

And then, Yamame became aware she could not hear what was being said.

* * *

Yamame Kurodani – the spider, builder of the Underworld, Yamame Kurodani the spinstress, mother of plagues, but most importantly Yamame Kurodani the woman – was not partial to swearing. Many of her associates were – could swear up a storm worse than a vengeful spirit, in fact – but Yamame herself had ever thought swearing an act of weakness.

And yet she swore. She grabbed at the first eldering god who came to mind, and condemned it to fates she would not have wished on her worst enemies.

Already her human had engaged his kinsman in keen conversation. The man, who had so rarely spoken to Yamame at length greater than a few words, was now gesturing round, no doubt speechifying on the spiders’ craftsmanship – while she, the spider in question, received no benefit of it. A pang of jealousy, which did not quite register in her conscious mind, flexed the joints of her fingers. Yamame wanted to hear. More than the settling of payment, more than the new purpose of her creation, more even than assessment of its quality. Yamame wanted to hear what was being said _about her_.

The warm, summer air around her shimmered as her senses began extending outward.

A phantom cracking sound played in the back of Yamame’s head as, from the puncture in her outmost barrier, a great, brown abdomen – heavy, round, bristling with hairs – agonisingly emerged. Two powerful limbs – thrice-segmented, each as thick as a grown man’s thigh – immediately followed. Another two did the same. And yet two more. Some of the legs found purchase at once; others still flailed for a moment or two before lodging the spider’s fat body in place. A monster had slipped in through the gaps in reality: a terrible legend, once again – if only temporarily – given loathsome flesh.

The ancient tree, already brittle from age and elements, groaned and sagged precariously under the weight.

None of this warranted the tiniest flicker of the spider’s attention. The feelings hairs on its legs stood at attention, sifting the breeze for the one particular frequency which concerned it. The air was rife with distractions. A type of small, four-legged prey species was nesting at the tree’s foot; in the neighbouring one’s crown the desperate cries of young avians raked the shivering leaves. Away yet, not-prey in numbers was milling about a clearing in the forest, which the spider knew on some level was important.

 _This,_ a voice prodded it from within. A female. _Focus on this!_

The spider’s body obeyed on its own accord, and its brain saw no reason to resist.

“—but this is most unexpected,” one of the bipedal not-prey was vibrating at another. “This is simply incredible. To think a god in our land commanded such respect… My apologies; forgive me, master. What did you say his name was?”

“Paranseberi.”

The voice (yes, voice, not a mere vibration) which gave the answer moved a mysterious piece in the spider’s primitive heart. What the piece was, and why it moved now – these questions made no matter to the arachnid mind.

“Paran…” The first not-prey struggled with the syllables. “Paransa…”

“Paran,” provided the other, the more important one. “Paran is apt. My lord takes no offence.”

“And your name, master?”

“By my lord’s illimited grace, I bear the same name.”

“Master Paran, then.” The less important not-prey clapped the ends of its upper limbs together. The sound was irritating. “You’ll forgive me if I confess I believed you a fraud at first. To countenance a god exists who controls the earth spiders…”

A certain earth spider perched a lunge’s length away bridled at the implication, until the same voice from before hushed its rising choler. _Not-prey,_ it whispered. _Not-prey, not-prey… Now, listen!_

A lilt was present in the other bipedal’s voice when it spoke, which the spider associated someway with a filled stomach. “My lord Paranseberi does not command the earth spiders,” it corrected, “regrettably; but he commands their respect, as you eloquently put it, and that is enough. My lord’s patronage grants me a degree of… imperviousness to the spiders’ poisons. Thus I walk among their kind. Thus to them I speak.”

“Yes, yes,” said the other one, “blessed art thou immune to those wicked creatures’ weapons. Your lord, Paran, deals with terrible things, but he is a merciful one. Cherish him till the end of your days. Though as for the earth spiders…” The not-prey excreted a fat globe of spit onto the ground. “A pox upon those abominations.”

“Ye-es,” replied the important not-prey, an odd pitch swaying its voice. “A pox indeed.”

The two humans (was that what they were?) shared a laugh at their bonding – one loud and unrestrained, the other tight and subdued. Then they entered the strange wooden cave bulging from the forest ground, and were heard no more.

_What was that?_

The female voice in the spider’s head was wondering aloud; and almost the spider answered, in its own spider-manner, when a lulling hand descended on its mind.

Too sudden. Too sudden and powerful was the hand. No defence mounted but for a twitch of its mandibles, the horrible legend faded gently back into obscurity.

What took its place among the now-splintered branches of the great tree was a creature in the shape of a young human woman.

The woman was very confused.

* * *

Minutes later, the human known among his own as Paran exited the shrine to find the grounds trampled and abandoned. In the time it had taken his contractor to inspect the shrine the servants had moved on indoors, now outfitting the new temple to _Inari_ with the spoils they had brought.

Under the enormous blood-red gateway, Paran’s tiny pushcart waited – loaded now with the goods agreed as the price. Though one promised item had been unfortunately missing, the shrine’s new owner’s good humour ensured a replacement being at once provided. Paran confirmed now a box different from the rest had been added to the pile. Thusly satisfied, he hefted the pushcart’s handle and began at a heavy slog down the road back to the Underworld’s entrance.

At the utmost second, however, he stopped.

He stopped, put the cart down, turned around, and spat viciously. A few words grated out of his throat which no one heard but Paran.

 _Thusly_ satisfied, the priest grabbed the cart again, and left.

All of this, Yamame – pressed to the opposite side of a nearby tree – took in with growing mystification in her heart.

* * *

“Hello again.”

The human’s chin buoyed up at being so greeted. In the middle of the road Yamame was standing, arms crossed behind her back. The man, labouring with the cart, worked out a noncommittal grunt of reply. Then he pushed the cart past her, and continued on.

The spinstress smiled, before spinning round on a heel and joining pace with the human at a prim three steps’ distance.

“So? How went it?” she asked, leaning over to get a better look at him. “All good, I hope? No floorboards gave in under the opulence of their new owner? The roof still whole? Those beams _really_ should have been thicker, you know.”

The man risked a crick in his neck by glancing over to the giddy woman. Then, his gaze slid down to the prizes stacked upon his cart, as though they alone could make their own case.

“Ah,” said Yamame. “All according to plan, then. Good job.”

A smile began to tug at the human’s sweat-sheened cheeks, but a sudden bump in the road robbed Yamame of seeing it bloom. _A pox upon that bump,_ she amused the irony of the curse in her head. Then, once no further reaction was secured from her human, Yamame fell back a step yet, cloaked in a musing quiet.

For the next long moments, she watched the cadence of his shoulders rising and falling to the work of his feet. Yamame had never before now paid this attention, but the shoulders were considerably wider than hers. The rest of the human’s torso as well, and all four sinewy limbs; though Yamame nursed no doubt hers was yet the superior physical strength, no matter the human’s size. Still the image slotted somehow into her imagination – like the primary threads of a web joining at a perfect angle.

These were strange thoughts, and Yamame shook them out of her brain through her ears. More pressing observations were yet to be made. Such as…

“Paran.”

… The human locking up for a split second at the mention of the name.

The blindfolded head whipped around, a frown rising up above the upper edge of the sash. “How—” The question died, its answer quicker than its predecessor. The answer was Yamame’s sheepish grin. “ _Kurodani,_ ” the man hissed. “You’d promised you would _leave._ ”

“And do you humans not speak of spinning webs of lies? Never mind that,” Yamame slashed his objections in two with a slice of the hand. “More interestingly – to me, to you – that word: Paran. That’s your name, isn’t it?”

The reply came delayed. “… No.”

“No?”

“No,” asserted the human, steadier by the moment. “It is not.”

“This is a tough stone to swallow,” said Yamame, “what with that grimace just now. Well, if that’s what you say, that’s what you say… Paran.”

Now the pushcart screeched to a halt. It reeled on the spot, all but spilling its precious contents, only prevented by the human re-seizing it at the last instant.

“I am _not Paran!_ ” barked Paran. He grunted with effort, heaving the cart back up. “Paranseberi doesn’t exist. I made him up, to excuse my acquaintance with you earth spiders. He is no more than a story. A mask.”

“I don’t care about Paran the god,” said Yamame. “I care about Paran the human.”

A second passed, and Yamame registered the embarrassing innuendo of what she had said; but if the man huffing over the pushcart had done the same, he did not show it.

“… They are one,” he said after a pregnant pause. “They are one and the same.”

Yamame opened her mouth to further question this “Paran” and his alleged non-existence, but then the smarter part of her mind engaged, and she realised she had touched a nerve.

The pause, heavy until now, gave an explosive birth, and plenty of smaller pauses let fly on the cloying air, leaving a wall of silence between the spinstress and her human, who was not Paran.

 _That was indelicate,_ thought Yamame, shame squeezing a blush out onto her face. _And we spiders were supposed to be subtle._ A betrayer idea came, that Yamame should dig herself deeper still and remind the man of the hug she had promised would be his; but then it popped like a bubble of soap, and Yamame thanked his being turned the other way. A reward _was_ due, that much civility was demanding – but what kind? Yamame scoured the reaches of her experience to find how she may reimburse a human’s services, and found…

… That she _absolutely_ did not know.

A frown, twin to the man’s from minutes ago, creased the bridge of her nose. Had he been one of her own, a decent meal would have satisfied protocol; most of the indecorous Oni she had bargained with on occasion would placate with rare enough alcohol. The mind-reader vicereine of Old Hell took no reward, gratified with being left to her unique loneliness. The Kappa and the Tengu who populated the cliffs of the Goddesses’ Mountain similarly held no value to an earth spider’s currency. The goddesses themselves… those in contrast were easy to content.

Yet what of humans?

More urgently, what of this one, who pushed his cart on in a cloud of agitated fumes?

( ) A visit in a bath house, maybe?  
( ) This was a task best left to one of Old Hell’s drinking halls.  
( ) Or maybe she could simply entertain him on her own.


	4. Chapter 4

(X) Or maybe she could simply entertain him on her own.

An absence of ideas whirred over Yamame’s empty head like a puff of flies that refused to land. This, while something she had at times had to deal with, did nothing to appease her, or to advance a solution. But what could she do? Yamame was a spider. Flies came to her, not otherwise.

So it must be with ideas.

Yamame’s human rolled on, unapprised of the sullen resignation settling in just four steps behind him. The steps then became three, then two, then only one. Still he sensed nothing, until Yamame spoke.

“So,” she said. “That’s another job done. What does this mean for us?”

The human glanced over, surprised at the innocuousness of the question. Yet after a brief reflection an answer came to him, which he obediently turned over.

“… We are jobless,” he concluded.

“Well, yes,” _tsk_ ed Yamame, “we _are_ jobless; but more importantly – we are _off the job._ What does this mean?”

“What _does_ it?”

“Obviously,” Yamame shrugged, “I’m going to be sending you out to grab another assignment before long. The last few have been fun; and I confess, human-fashion buildings are a trial I’ve savoured so far. I’d like to keep doing those. There are considerations there that challenge my previous exposure. The need for weather-proof roofing, for one. Or upper floors which won’t simply be flown up to. I seldom had to account for those in the Underworld. It’s a new thing, and it has been enlightening. And really, really fun – reception notwithstanding.”

The human made a grunt that could have meant anything.

“At any rate,” went on Yamame, “you and I both have deserved a touch of rest. So I’m declaring a day or two off. Just so you know.”

“These will need to be set in,” the man pointed out, with his long nose aimed square at the packs of goods.

“A day or two off of the main job. You’re my envoy, but also my house-minder. That includes stacking boxes. And on this sensational topic…”

This bit of selfishness released, Yamame skipped up to the cart, and pounced on the first box which arrested her eye. This, Yamame’s eyes being sharper than those of creatures lesser than she, proved the one box disparate in packaging from the rest.

“They will be hard to sleigh down the stairs if they are ripped apart,” warned Yamame’s human, even as Yamame stabbed her fingers into the coloured wax paper. “Kurodani, please—”

“Oh, be quiet,” hushed the spinstress, extracting the first item within out into the light of day.

The item swished and unfurled to become a lavish garment of the deepest gold – a dress so bright and glittering that almost Yamame lost her colour in comparison.

Then she _did_ lose her colour, and her brows attempted to make a single line over her eyes.

“Whaaat is this?” she whined, shaking the dress back and forth to the risk of blindness for anyone on looking. “What is this? I wanted _fabrics!_ Not ready-made clothes. I wrote that down, too! Why are there _dresses?_ ”

Her human screwed up his mouth. “The fabrics,” he said, “they forgot to bring. These… were given as substitute.”

“What am I supposed to do with these?” Yamame grumbled on. “The material is fine and all, but these aren’t even my size!” She brought the dress flat to her front, only to expose she had missed the evaluation. “All right, I stand corrected. These almost _are_ my size – but that’s off the point. They’re ridiculous! Humans really wear these?”

“Apparently so.”

“And this one? And this? Or this?” Yamame removed further pieces one by one. All were dazzling, all were brilliant, some – very daring. And every one teased out a chuff of scepticism from the Underworld’s great architect. “Whoever spun these must have been in her cups. Not that anything’s wrong with that, but… Fish-scale? You are joking. It’s polished to a mirror shine, too. That’s some devotion to the cause. No, I respect the work done here. Not saying I’d wear it anywhere but indoors, but I respect it. There’s an earmark of skill here. Married to no hint of taste, but a lot of skill all the same. These stitches must have been hours… Still, human women are something else. Why would they wear something like this?”

“To… attract males?” guessed the most nearby human.

“There’s a funny idea,” scoffed Yamame. “And you would be caught?”

The man coughed uncomfortably. “They’re… certainly noticeable.”

Yamame Kurodani did not hear a _twang_ of stretching thread – though her inner senses held otherwise. The latest dress excavated from the outcast box – little more than a bathing suit shaped painstakingly of minuscule jet rings which gleamed like spilled ink in the Sun – began to drag on the ground as her arms slacked. She yanked it up, awareness sparking back on like a flickering lamp.

Her human was staring on the road ahead, unaware of her little slip.

“Can you not still use these?” he asked.

And then, an idea landed.

Yamame tossed the black piece on the cart to be reunited with its sisters in a garish mound of expensive cloth. A grin worked out onto her face, which chased her previous indecision away at a scamper. To repurpose the dresses as something more approaching practicality would be easy. The stitching was complex – in places convoluted – but nothing beyond Yamame’s skill. To remove it without ruining the fabric would be a simple, if long, matter.

But, before that, perhaps these pieces could be given their one last honour.

“Yes,” Yamame said resolutely. “Yes. In fact, I _can_ use them.”

* * *

When Yamame at last slumped face-first onto the buffed cushions of her sofa, it was hours since the business topside. The hours had been less than pleasant – rather approaching drudgery than a glorious return – with the boxes having to be towed all the way down to Yamame’s underground home. Now that they had been, however, and gutted of their many treasures, Yamame could permit herself to slump. So she had, with all due dispatch.

Her human was showering.

Though _shower_ may be a generous term, where it comprised a tiny cabin plopped behind the house and a bucket with holes punched in the bottom hung from the ceiling; but with water heated over the cooking fire, and a bar of good soap, it might be very well applied. Water enough was supplied from the subterranean stream nearby; and with Yamame’s latest project paid off, there were now soaps until the top of the shelf in her storehouse. Among other items which never would have been found there only a few months ago. Soaps, tools, fabrics, foods and condiments, and bottles of rare drink, even chunks of shiny metals forged into curious shapes by the gifted smiths of the Human Village – for she had lacked for none of these since admitting the human into her service. The fascinating challenges of over-world architecture were one thing; another entirely were the benefits of working with such a sophisticated culture as one which sewed its clothes of silk and polished fish-scale.

Yamame rolled onto her side. The box of dresses she had smuggled out whilst the human had been securing the perishable foods now waited in her bedroom – itching to deliver its contents their final rite, before those, too, were torn into basic constituents. _Not long now,_ the spinstress sent out to the box, which didn’t deign to send a reply back. Yamame giggled to herself at its obstinacy.

An iron hinge squeaked, and Yamame climbed to all fours to see her human entered through the back door of the house. The man, towelling fiercely at his hair, was as roseate as an infant. The loose-fitting robe he was bundled up in – which Yamame had tailored for him from one of the previous hauls – complemented the sight in a way she found oddly gratifying, in an aesthetic sense.

Yamame shuffled aside when he approached, then bounced up when he dropped on the couch just as bodily as she had, minutes before. The entire sequence of events made her giggle all over again.

“What?”

The human was glaring from beneath a mess of towel and hair.

Yamame swatted the glare aside with a wave and a smile. “Nothing,” she said. “How was it, then? Washed your hair?”

“… I did.”

“Good. Let me see.”

The man went still as Yamame jerked the towel from his hands. Then he went even stiller when she took his head by the temples, tugged it close herself, and breathed in.

The soap had definitely a nice scent to it. A rich, earthy aroma over all, with a trace of freshly skinned wood, a smattering of citrus, and an underrunning shadow of something which Yamame couldn’t place, but which associated with a great body of water in her mind. A somewhat heady aroma, but decidedly better than the last month’s yield.

Yamame let go, sitting back on her haunches and humming to herself in approval. “Yes,” she said, “that’s really good. I like that. You should do this more often. Maybe I don’t understand you humans’ love of running water, but for this I’m willing to admit my wrong. We should have gone down and stopped by the bath house in the capital. This’d have impressed the eyelashes off of those prissy damsels what go there. Maybe even some males, too. Well, a bit too late for that now. Maybe next time. You’re fine with getting in a tub with other boys and girls, right?”

“Kurodani.”

Yamame closed her eyes. “You mean me, or any of my hundred brood sisters?”

“You.”

When she looked again, the human was as immune to indirect suggestion as he had ever been. “That’s clear as clear,” gave up Yamame, “given it’s only you and me here. What is it?”

“I must apologise.”

“You must? You are sure?”

“Yes. I have treated you unfairly.”

 _These revelations keep piling up today,_ thought Yamame. “Tell me where and when, and I’ll give you a good telling off, then. ‘Cause, to my ear and eye, you’ve been mostly the same as usual today.”

The human winced. “I… mean the ‘Paran’ thing.”

“Oh?” Now he had her full attention – or fuller anyway than he had already. “What about the ‘Paran’ thing?”

“My… reaction was overmuch. Uncalled for. I was rude. You had every right to ask.” A groan rattled out of the man’s throat, and he palmed his reddening face. “Merely I… I didn’t intend for you to find out. The very reason my ‘Paranseberi’ came about is redundant and shouldn’t be. He is but a convenient bypass to what prejudice exists against you… You _and_ your kin. An insult that never should have come to pass. You _have_ no gods ruling over you—”

“What’s your point?”

The man choked up at the demand in her voice, but Yamame didn’t rescind it. There was progress attempting to be made here – awkward, belated progress, and the attempt was ponderous at best – but she wanted it made, and soon. So she watched with unrelenting eyes until her flushed human finally released it.

“My… point,” he sank to a whisper, “is that… if you wish, Kurodani… You may call me… You may call me ‘Paran’ – _if_ you so wish.”

 _And there it is,_ thought Yamame. _And it only took my catching him making me a servant of his god behind my back._

Any other time, and Yamame would have slapped his back and laughed about it all. Not now. Anything but the most serious answer, and she felt all the clumsy development would unspool and siphon back into the black maw of an unreliable future. She had such an answer, of course – _had_ had it for some time, stored away in a dustier, but completely safe corner of her mind. A new part now hovered by, waiting to be attached, but most of the answer had been twined long ago.

The only question which remained: should she attach it? The name of this god who did not exist?

( ) “Paran” it was. And done.  
( ) She asked, pointedly, if he had anything else he wanted to be called.

* * *

(X) She asked, pointedly, if he had anything else he wanted to be called.

To incur the wrath of a false god seemed an immaterial worry. Nor did Yamame especially fear ones with a claim on reality; yet to take a name of its own quality, and lash it to a person who regarded it so little, sat wrong with her on a philosophical level. A god or no – and real or otherwise – names were powerful things. This much, even in her desire to truly know her human, Yamame – the _eight-eyed_ – could never forget.

“Now, ‘Paran’ is fine and all,” she said, “extremely fine; but is there _anything else_ – anything at all – you would like me to call you? Anything. Only tell me.”

The man, no less flustered than he had been with it there, removed his hand from his face. A surprised face had left his eyes wider than the rule – wider, perhaps, even than when he had first braved the Underworld’s dark passages. Whether this was due to the yearning in her voice – which she had consciously resolved not to hide – or something else yet, Yamame did not know.

“… Why?” he asked.

A fair question – and one Yamame had been prepared to answer to for months. “Names have power here in the Underworld,” she told him, gravely, “or anywhere else for that matter; but here particularly, by the peculiarities of this place. A soul may be saved – or damned – by the knowledge of its name. As they have been. Gods are born – and killed – by their names attiring them a shape… or stripping it.” The spinstress shed the cautionary tone, commuting it to an easy smile. “Of course, I just want to know you – really, really want to know you.”

“You _have_ known me,” her human pointed out.

“Have I?” chuckled Yamame. “We’ve spent some time together, that’s true; but look at us, really. You journey to the Human Village on your own whenever the last project is handed in; then, when I venture out to work, you stay down here to mind the house. I don’t even know what you _do_ here, when I’m not around!”

“I clean up,” the man quickly supplied, “I manage stores, sometimes I read—”

“And I,” she told him, “never asked. I _trust_ you – I have said this already. Today at the latest. So don’t linger over it. You improved my life a dozen-fold since you waddled down here on your bumbling human legs. More than that, you enabled me to further pursue the one thing which I love. Trusting you is the least I can do to compensate.”

“So what’s the trouble?”

“The ‘trouble’ is that _I want to know your name._ Trust is won readily by trade, but names – as I said just then, names have power. And I want to have power over you. So _give_ , ‘Paran,’” Yamame begged, staring with hungry eyes; “or if you don’t want me using this name, any of the others you may happen to own. Just give.”

 _I’m tired of waiting,_ she urged inside her head. _Give!_

The man, no longer able to match the thirst in her gaze, looked instead to the hands limply rested on his lap. Human hands, those – but, as Yamame had so pleasantly learned, not without a use. A battle was visibly joined in the man’s chest; but it was swift to become won as the thunder-clouds drained away from his expression.

“No,” he said, some of his morning self’s courage mounting back behind his eyes. “No. I haven’t carried a different name since…” And then, his words faded away, his jaw seized up on the last syllable it had been made to shape. Almost Yamame had thought him lost to some terrible memory, when the human blinked and spoke again, as though the pause had never been there. “No. I have never carried a different name. Just ‘Paranseberi.’”

Yamame slapped a palm against her forehead. _All of that – for this?_ She would go insane if she did not laugh.

And so the human did the only thing he could do: to watch and smile a stripling’s meek smile as Yamame laughed, until her lungs gave out, and the couch quit squeaking underneath them both.

“You,” the spinstress blew out, “are an exercise for patience! Thankfully mine’s as sturdy as my building.” A hand wiped across the eyes, and she regained a kernel of the seriousness she had – mistakenly – assumed would be so vital. “Very good. A cautious route, then. I will call you ‘Paran’ – but only when the circumstance presents, and no-when else. This way, I get the power I want, while you get to keep it under as many wraps as keep it warm to your liking. I have had another, private name for you for the longest time, anyway.”

“What is it?”

“‘My human,’” Yamame said, grinning. “Now, yes-yes, I know,” she went on when her human raised a doubt-laden brow, “very imaginative; but the distinction is very, very important to me. You’ll remember that reputation of mine which ultimately allowed you to sit here now smelling of my soaps. It’s not the sort which endears me to many humans – all but any humans, to be brutally precise. Or precisely brutal. That’s why it’s a meaningful name, for meaningful humans.”

“… I see.”

“And so—” Yamame squared her back, all formal, “—with that out of our way… It is nice to finally meet you: my human, sometimes called Paran.”

“And you as well,” he nodded, “Kurodani.” A few moments trickled away into the silence of the house before the human sometimes called Paran registered Yamame was earnestly standing by for something else. “Is… _Is_ there something else?” he asked. “Kurodani?”

Yamame lurched, her eyelashes fluttering like trapped butterflies. “Huh? Um, huh? There… There wasn’t a ritual to this, too?”

“A ‘ritual?’” The human’s face was a study in scepticism.

Yamame mimicked some manner of gesture, which did not come out half so well enough as to mean anything to Paran. “This thing,” she said, as though it did anyway, “with your palms. I have seen you clasp those with other humans, when you met. Or were you grabbing their wrists? Could have been either. That’s not a ritual of some kind?”

“Ah.”

“Yes, rather ‘ah.’”

“No, I mean, that’s what we men do, is all,” the man present explained. “Not a ‘ritual’ in the strictest meaning – though I guess close.”

Yamame slid closer. “What about men and women?”

“What?”

“I am a woman. A female.”

The human made as though to confirm this titbit visually, before the misplaced information resurfaced quite by itself.

“Well, yes—” he began.

Yamame rode him over. “So how do men and women do this? The same way?”

“Well, they may…”

“Or was there an addition you’re not telling me about? Ah,” Yamame smiled at the misgiving once again twisting the mouth her human. “There was, wasn’t there? No, I know what it is; this tradition has spread recently in Old Hell. Whence – I couldn’t say. Still here it is. They say it goes like this: the male takes the female’s hand—”

“Kurodani—?”

“The male,” she stressed, extending one arm, “takes the female’s hand. Take mine. Then, hold it – hold it hori… horizontally.” All of Yamame’s instincts scrambled when the human did cup her hand in his; but she kept the shock of being so deliberately touched under a will so set on its desired end, no hair dared stand on her the back of her neck. “Yes,” she breathed, a little heavier than she’d meant to, “yes, just like that, parallel to the ground. Then… The male puts his lips to the top – the top? – of the female’s palm. Yes, I think that was it. Not to worry. I’m calm – I won’t bite.”

“Kurodani,” grunted her human. “Why are you making me do this?”

“Curiosity?” Yamame made a flat shrug. “Maybe breaking in my newfound power. Maybe something else. I’m not certain. Just following a hunch. Am I making a very big fool of myself?”

“No,” he said. Then, after further considering, he added, “Not very.”

Now came Yamame’s turn to torture her mouth with geometry it was never supposed to fit out. “Then I’m missing some critical component, aren’t I? What? Is the angle wrong? Not the right hand?”

“No. It’s… Only that… Are you calm?”

“Quite calm,” Yamame lied.

“… Very good, then. Very good… Nice to meet you, Kurodani.”

And then, sooner than Yamame may rethink her careless demands, her instructions were dutifully followed.

The spinstress watched, tense as a spring, as her hand was discreetly brought up to her human’s face, and pushed against the warm, tender flesh of his lips.

The sensation was… novel.

Not to say startling – not enough anyway to vindicate her irritable spider’s senses thrashing about in their cage – so Yamame chewed on a nail of her free hand to stave off any frightened cries escaping to make the situation embarrassing for her and her human. The sensation was novel – but, once her most natural response had been snuffed, she had to grudgingly accept nothing to bite over. There were many properties of human women Yamame grasped very loosely (though some she had gathered a tighter hold on in the recent months), but if indeed they enjoyed being greeted in this fashion, and the man called Paran had _not_ simply indulged the overweening ignorance of one blushing earth spider – Yamame could see why it was so. The sensation _was_ novel – but novelty was almost never inherently wrong.

The ritual stretched (or had it only done so in her head?) over to the next minute; still, being as innocent of over-world etiquette as she was, Yamame submitted to her human’s greater expertise. A faint pull of distress tugged at her heart when at last he relinquished first the top of her hand, then the remainder of it.

A disorientated Yamame met the human’s returning attention. Almost, and she would have missed his next words.

“And we men,” he said, “think these pleasantries a waste of time.”

Had it been a joke? If so, Yamame did not understand. “… Good work,” she mustered out, though she couldn’t vouch if it had been. “I definitely feel… connected, now. What a terrifyingly potent ritual.”

The man seated beside her rasped something that could have been a reply, a splutter, snorted laughter, or all three at once.

For a reason she had no time to speculate, Yamame cradled the hand which had been recently used for a contract; for then, she remembered what she had witlessly forgotten in the flurry of her human’s confession of his name. And none too soon; for the man had only just finished spluttering (or replying, or laughing, or none of the three), when Yamame sprung from the couch to her feet.

The shift in the cushions must have alerted him. On he looked up, finding the spinstress again in her grinning element – even if she did keep one of her hands pressed possessively to her chest.

“Hold out here without me for a minute,” she told him, and if there ever had been a dishevelled Yamame, this one was not she. “Would you believe I almost forgot? But I’ve got just the best thing for you. A minute, hmm? No more, promise.”

Then, waiting on no consent, she rounded about, and flitted off to melt in the shadows swirling beyond her bedroom’s door.

* * *

When again she emerged, she was more goldfish than spider.

Half across the salon walked this new Yamame, her familiar saunter calling forth a giggling crackle from the dress’s scale-mesh skirt. Having moulted her other two primary colours – earthen and black – this Yamame was a parade of gold. The parade drew up at the couch, and the beautiful lead picked up her skirt to present a teasing bow. Then, she stepped back – stepped back, laughed at the silliness of it all, and span – and the skirt blossomed out like a subterranean flower. What kind of flower grew yet in the Underworld, how it maintained such a golden brilliance and why – these issues concerned neither the dress, nor the Yamame wrapped up inside it.

And united in this lack of concern, the two straightened out in front of the human seated on the couch. Their unity expanded to an unspoken craving of a review – unspoken, but visible on both Yamame’s face and the excited glitter of the dress. At first the human offered none; only he stared on, brows slightly furrowed.

At length words had found him.

“Kurodani,” he said. “Which… _part_ of this is for me?”

Yamame angled her head. “Huh? What do you mean?”

Another pause, and the man had broken into the deeper vaults of his vocabulary. “What I mean is,” he said, grunting (apparently from the effort involved), “ _how_ is this for me?”

“That’s the same question, only dressed otherwise,” protested Yamame. “If you’re asking what this is, then for your lamentable human sight, it is a last rite. For these pieces, obviously.” The spinstress gave a bare-shouldered shrug. “You acknowledged and praised their artistry; I acknowledged and praised it as well. Though for my benefit my reasons were somewhat more professional. At any rate, this is a last rite before I tear them apart and utilise the scraps. The last dance for the author of a certain overwrought collection.”

“And my part is…?”

“And your part,” Yamame stabbed a finger at the thick-skulled man, “is to enjoy seeing these pieces you praised filled out one last time. Or, if you were asking practical rather than philosophical, your part is to look and appraise. All creations wish appraisal: dresses, cookery, architecture – no different. Often it is their only remaining pleasure.”

“So,” said the human, understanding dawning, “I am supposed to sit here – and praise the dresses?”

“Ap-praise,” Yamame corrected. “Though if you see nothing wrong, cut the former bit off at your leisure.”

“… Of course.”

The man sat back, crossing his legs. His eyes narrowed as they walked up and down the length of the dress (and the Yamame contained therein). A dark expression gathered behind them like a rainstorm even as they so walked. Why so, however – this Yamame had to ask to know.

“Are you dissatisfied somehow?”

“No.” The examination never slowed down as he answered. “No.”

The spinstress called upon the trust she held for the human, and didn’t research why he had said it twice. Nor speak at all. Not until the inspecting gaze pulled up and stuck at her face. Then she could hold it in no more.

“Well?” she asked explosively.

The man replied, measured and careful: “… You look good in it.”

And so Yamame exploded again – this time with riotous laughter, which made the dress tinkle so much like a brisk underground rivulet all but she doubled over laughing harder.

“What,” she gasped out, “am I getting unstitched tomorrow as well? The dress! What about the dress?”

A smile that must have gone off the bad side twitched briefly on the human’s mouth. Then immediately a new one was brought in to replace the stale specimen, and the man attempted once more: “… It looks good on you.”

Yamame _prf_ ed. “Amateur!” Then, she blew out the remaining air between her teeth. “All right, this isn’t working. Maybe this one’s just incompatible with your sensibilities. No helping it. Let me give it a prod.” The spinstress pointed her thumbs to the dress’s shoulder straps. “First off, these are unpadded but for a single layer of rayon. This is not enough for a piece of this overall weight. A thin strip of felt wouldn’t have hurt. Had I worn this all evening, I’d have stood up a stripe-shouldered spider in the morning. Of course, you aren’t squeezed inside here with me, so you couldn’t have known that. What you could have, is that these ruched sides are an absolute farce!” Yamame ran a palm down one rippled flank of the dress. “What is this even for? Have you ever seen a fish? Touched it? Scale is supposed to be smooth – smooth, not rolled up like fat on a Yama’s belly! Isn’t this meant to imitate fish? A fat fish is a dead one! Most of all—” here the spinstress bent down to point out where the dress rounded off in a jagged, scaly line a little above her knee, “—this entire section has no lining whatsoever. I’m scraping my thighs on fish here! A few hours, and I’d need someone to help rub in some soothing salve. Granted, this is the best place to shave off some weight if you’re going to do it; but this piece is already making me feel like a fish – a fat, shored one. May as well finish the job.”

“So you don’t like it?”

“No, that’s not it,” shook her head Yamame, barely aware she was twisting about to inspect finer details of the dress. “That’s just my personal experience running away with me. Maybe human females have parts I don’t. Soft bits where I’m tough – that kind of thing. Although I’m plenty soft in my own estimation. Anyway, no – it’s not that I don’t like it. The colour, for one – it agrees with me on a level even your inexpert eye took note. Truth be told, even now I’m crying inside that I couldn’t find a matching bow. All of mine are either black or brown. No gold ones. Sniff.”

“Sew a new one—”

“The dress’ll be gone by that time. I’ll just have to hope my hair doesn’t get stuck when I take it off. Already had some get pinched between the scales when I was adjusting. This is why I don’t let my hair down, really. Also, let’s not fool ourselves,” Yamame reminded, before her hair care may be further commentated on, “this piece is a work of craftsmanship. Very good craftsmanship, and a lot of work. This – shoulder-straps, fat rolls and everything else notwithstanding – has never changed. The stitching is still exquisite, and I’ll weep for every inch of it I have to unmake. But I’ve no use for it myself, and I need the fabrics for other things. What a cruel fate.” She picked up the skirt of the dress again, before dropping it back down with a sigh. “Apt for Old Hell, though – I suppose. Paran?”

The human’s eyes snapped up. “Yes?”

“You aren’t having very much fun with this, are you?”

This time, the smile which answered was well-known to Yamame.

“None whatsoever,” said Paran.

* * *

“All right, let’s try a different dress then.”

After she had said which, Yamame swam off with exaggerated fish motions again to her bedroom. Upon her next resurfacing, the human who was her envoy as well as house-keeper witnessed a creature carven straight from the pages of a book. The book was a western fairy tale, old and somewhat exaggerated, of a fantastic ballroom where women competed for the envy of their peers through the elaboration of their costumes. And now so was Yamame, even if whatever competition she once had had been long routed.

This picture set before him, the human extended the best feedback he believed in:

“You look good in it.”

And then, upon being chided for misdirecting the commentary:

“It looks good on you.”

To which Yamame’s response was to pertinently demonstrate where and how he had erred in such a reckoning, and where – whilst more or less accurate – such a judgement skimmed the finer ins and outs of the craft. Then, the human’s interest expended (or had it been expendable in the first place?), she skittered back to her bedroom to shed this dress and slip into the next one. And dress after dress after dress, this series of events repeated through half the evening.

At least so it had been, until Yamame’s thread of patience finally strained too far. The spinstress ripped the collar which had been included with the latest piece from her neck, and threw it down to the floor.

“Why are you humans _so hard to please?!_ ”

All other possibilities exhausted, the Underground’s most genius architect turned from the esoteric hobby she had earnestly trusted she could share with her human, to the one she knew _for a fact_ both humans and her ilk partook in with similar love. The matter of which was safely stored away in her larder.

When she came back with a sloshing green-glass bottle the size of her forearm, she was grinning.

The grin died when, the bottle placed before him, the human Paran smiled up at her angelically.

“Kurodani,” he said, for once betraying some amusement. “One problem.”

“What?”

“… I do not drink.”

Yamame felt like throttling something. “You…”

“No need to go dry on my account, though,” her human added helpfully.

What could she do? She drank.

* * *

Hours later, Yamame woke up.

This was nothing far off the usual; but these singular hours had left Yamame waking groggy, stuffy-mouthed, and afoul of a migraine which only waited the nudge of rising to spear into the meat of her brain. Her digits ached. Underneath the blanket, her clothes were clinging to her body disagreeably. A knot of hair, goo and barbs had ostensibly been substituted for her voice box sometime in the night, and if she had to guess what her eyelids were coated in, Yamame’s expertise would say mortar was the most likely.

Among all of this, there was one part of Yamame which felt incredibly good. The scalp of her head.

The mortar on her eyes must have been poorly applied – it cracked when Yamame pushed; and as her sight was returned stabbing and flailing, the fingers gently digging in her hair stiffened to a halt.

“Kuro—… Yamame?”

The human called Paran must have been visited by another of Underworld’s denizens in Yamame’s mental absence; for he doubled and octupled in her eyes when she looked. He quit doing that soon, thankfully, only one copy of him remaining. Its face was looming above Yamame now at a steep angle, its features drawn in a slightly apprehensive frown which sparked off a mistaken instinct in her blunted mind. She willed it down.

“Three things,” croaked Yamame, pushing herself up to a hump-backed sit. “First of all, get me some water. A lot of water. Or anything without alcohol. Just a lot of it.”

The man nodded, very seriously, and set down the book he had been holding in his other hand. The one which had not been petting Yamame. Then, he stood up and left without a word, on humankind’s perpetual quest for drinkable water.

Alone now, Yamame examined her surroundings. She was still in the cosy salon of her tiny house nearby the Underworld’s outlets. This was to the good. Three green-grass bottles were lying on the table, like corpses drained of their lifeblood – empty. Three. This was less to the good. Yamame counted again, but the number stubbornly refused to change. A collection of gaudy dresses lay strewn across the floor, but none Yamame would remember putting on again in drunken stupor. The trouble was, she remembered little otherwise.

The human returned victorious from his mission, carrying a tall glass of mercifully clear liquid. Yamame snatched it greedily when it came close enough, and gulped down half the contents in one go. She did not instantly feel better, but sensed her body going to work on it with enthusiasm.

Nursing her glass, shrouded in her blanket, and – while not yet fully awake – certainly less clogged-up, Yamame met again her human’s dimly concerned stare.

“Second of all,” she told him huskily, “I’ve been hinting at you to use my given name for _weeks_. Why start now?”

“You… stopped hinting.”

“What?”

The human’s eyes glided off to the side. “… You made it very pointed this time. Threatened to give me… things with strange names. I had no choice but to comply.”

“… Well, it has been getting my back up a deal,” Yamame murmured.

“What’s that?”

“Nothing.” The spinstress downed the rest of her water. “Very good… You do that. Use my given name from now on. I don’t remember what I threatened to give you, but I’ll improvise if I must. And speaking of threats…” Her eyes hardened into amber chunks. “Third of all, we spiders are skittish and sensitive creatures – extremely so. Was getting bitten once not enough for you? I don’t know what you were doing to my head and how it was meant to help or heal me; but I remind you – the business with my _hand_ had been with my express approval. I’m not saying it _didn’t_ feel… just a bit nice – but poking your fingers at a spider who hasn’t clearly permitted you to do so is an invitation to—”

“You also told me to do that.”

“What?”

“You said…” The human coughed. “You told me to – to show you how else humans… fraternised.”

Yamame felt her face burn. “And you—”

“Chose the least invasive sample.” He spread his arms. “More appropriate for parents and children, for which deception I apologise; but it seemed to please you all the same. Understand – I have heard from one of your associates, who came by a while ago, that you were an amiable drunk. Still, I didn’t want to risk startling you.”

 _Then they know I am keeping a human here with me,_ thought Yamame. A profusion of off-hand ribs and remarks from the recent months now shifted into unwilling sensibility. Not all of them – but enough to make Yamame claw at her miserable face.

“You humans and your love of physical contact…” she groaned. “Why did I even bother with those dresses? I should have just offered to touch you, instead.”

“Yamame.” The human’s voice was faintly pained. “That would have been… inappropriate.”

 _Now what?_ she thought. “How so?”

“In human culture,” sighed the man, “touching is usually reserved to one’s children and family members.”

“And men and women you’ve just met.”

“And men and women you’ve just met,” he agreed. “Yet that is only for greetings. Men are at times allowed to touch other men, as are women, conversely. Anything which goes beyond that, however – specially between males and females – is tightly restricted to… to one’s _mating partner._ ”

“Mating—” Yamame choked on a ball of rising anger. “I’m not an animal! Name things what they are!”

“Yes. Wives and husbands, or lovers, then.”

“See? I know those words. No need to… dumb things down for me. I am a spider, but I’m also more than spider. I’m not… an animal. I’m more.”

“Yes.” The human sat down beside her. “Sorry.”

A pause, as heavy as the boxes from the previous day, settled in between the two. Then the man, apparently bending under its weight, leaned forward to grab at the bottles on the table. Yamame watched – convinced at first he had meant to simply toss them out – as her human stood them up and began arranging the bottles in random, clinking patterns for the space of the next minute.

When the minute broke, Yamame spoke up.

“Want to talk about it?”

“About what?” the human replied from his little game.

“About touching.”

 _Now_ he looked. “Yamame,” he warned, scowling. “This is a bad idea.”

 _Of course it is,_ Yamame agreed inside. _I have had no other kind since yesterday._ There was but one difficulty left. _How do I approach this one?_

( ) Calmly and reasonably.  
( ) Aggressively.  
( ) It was too bad an idea after all.


	5. Chapter 5

(X) Calmly and reasonably.

Had Yamame been born anything else than a spider – who were hunters as well as artisans – she could have tripped over this dilemma. She didn’t. To force the issue would have been easy; but Yamame’s aptitude went further than an Oni’s uncritical persistence, or a Tengu’s clever politicking. An ambush on the prey’s home ground – this was the spider’s way. And this man’s home – as it was with most humans – lay across the plains of reason.

_Prey?_ Yamame had just the opportunity to wonder at her brainwork, before out of her mouth the challenge was delivered:

“All right. Let’s be reasonable for a moment.”

“Fine, let’s.” The reply came so fast, so incisive (and pointed up with the bottles clattering flat on the table), that almost Yamame began to doubt her ambushing ability. The human at the centre of these doubts was fully turned now – arms crossed, and locking the spinstress with a stare as forbidding as a stare could be – humanly. “Fine, let’s,” he said once more. “Answer me this, then, with reason: why should we talk about it at all?”

_I want to, that’s why; and I know somehow you do as well,_ Yamame would have said – if she had been an Oni, or her drunk careless self from last night. For the sober now, she had an answer better by leagues. “There are two – two reasons,” she said, demonstrating with her fingers. “Firstly, now we have been properly acquainted, I want to use this as a learning experience. There are complexities to handling you humans which – to me – are just as new as the involutions of your architecture. And both of these have been… intriguing. At least what little I’ve so far faced. So!” Yamame smacked the cushion in front of her crossed legs, “I want to use this windfall friendly human who’s tumbled down into my blowhole to teach me about both of those. He has already enabled me to tackle one of them – and if he’ll suffer me to say this, it was the more requiring of time and effort of the two. The other one should be simplicity by comparison.”

“That is a healthy reason.”

“Thank you,” grinned Yamame, though in her mind the compliment caught in a foul corner of her web. “Anyhow. Secondly,” she resumed, “now we have been properly acquainted, I wish to know even more about this windfall friendly human who’s tumbled down into my blowhole – personally.”

The human grimaced. “That is less healthy.”

“And,” Yamame finished, “to my stunted, unenlightened, two-legged form, it seems that touching – it could play a vital assistant. These are my reasons.” A rightfully fulfilled smile on her face, the spinstress retreated her arms inside the blanket. “So? Any counter-reasons you may want to voice?”

“Yes. Three.”

_That’s one more than I had,_ Yamame thought worriedly; but she kept her worries as she kept the rest of herself – inside a warm cocoon, only the head peeking out curiously. She did not know what the head of a worry looked like, or on which end it was located, but amused the mental image all the same. “Go on then,” she allowed graciously.

The man Paran sucked in a breath before answering. “Firstly,” he said, “I don’t trust you, Yamame.”

Something in Yamame’s chest clinched so hard all the reason momentarily escaped her. “What—”

Her human mounted a double-palmed shield against her wide-eyed stare. “Take heed, Yamame.”

“What heed?!” Yamame blurted. “What do you mean, you don’t trust me?! What have I done to you?!”

“Not much; certainly less than is told of you in the village – but this is not my point.”

“Then what is?”

“You are, Kurodani,” said the human. “Calm down.”

The returned use of her family name jarred her attention back to familiar territory. “Yamame!” she demanded. “Use my given name!”

Her hand slowly let go of the dress it had been gripping under the blanket – and with belated clarity Yamame recognised which dress this was. Not her own, comfortable earthen creation, which she had over the years made her signature; nor was it one of the extravagant dresses she had shown off for her disinterested human. This was – and the scraping of tiny rings on her skin was unambiguous – the bawdy black piece she had offended at the previous day.

Unaware why, she pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders.

“Yamame? Are you calm?” the human Paran was asking.

_No,_ thought the spinstress; but for her human she murmured a firm, “Yes. I’m calm.”

If Paran was fooled, he made only a tentative pretence of it. “Very good… but this was a miscue. I trust you, Yamame – but what I don’t trust is… _you_.”

Against the tightness inside her, Yamame released a chuckle. “That’s more me than I knew there was. Who’s this other me you don’t trust, then?”

“The one who bit me months ago,” the man said bluntly, “when I caught her to steady myself after slipping on the stairs. The one whose hand was trembling when I touched it yesterday. This Yamame.”

“That’s me,” said this Yamame.

And in the face of this confession, Paran agreed. “That’s you. And that’s whom I don’t trust. You said so yourself, Yamame – you spiders are sensitive creatures. And this sensitivity… it is unpredictable. It scares me.”

_Of all the things,_ she thought. _Never mind my reputation, my powers, my terrible origins. It’s my getting startled that’s scary._ Yamame shook her head. “So that’s the first reason,” she said. “Very healthy, indeed. What’s the second one?”

“… I don’t trust myself.”

This she had to laugh at. “Ha! What, are you so quick with your teeth as well?”

The human gratified the joke with a smile. “Have I bitten you?”

“No. Though I feel not for want of excuses. I’ve nudged you _more_ than once.”

“Just so.”

“So why the sore lack of trust on all fronts?”

“Well… Well.”

A rare sight was a consternated Paran, but here one was, rubbing the bridge of his nose right in front of Yamame. A rare sight and fleeting, the spinstress discovered, as the gesture was cut off with conscious deliberation. A pity, she discovered again, when her human outfitted instead the serious expression regular in his everyday habit.

“This is tough to talk about,” he said, “so I’ll be short. Your theory, Yamame, was on point; and touching is indeed ingrained in us humans. So ingrained, often we engage in it unthinking, once permitted. This is why it’s… dangerous… to ask me to… to touch you.”

“You couldn’t stop yourself touching me again,” Yamame guessed.

The human moved in an odd way – somewhere between a squirm and a shiver, but not quite fully on either side. “Please. Just… listen to me.” He shut his eyes and pressed on the eyelids with two fingers. “We are all shackled by our natures; you are bounded by yours, and I – by mine. This is a truth neither of us can escape. Nor is there sense in upsetting over it; and for all it counts, I do not hold you responsible for biting me that one time.” The human’s eyes opened again, and this time Yamame’s heart lurched at the pleading look inside. “So please,” the man said, quietly, “don’t ask me to touch you, Yamame.”

And though it meant a loss of some kind, Yamame gave up a slow nod.

“… Very good,” she said. “But we’ve still one more reason to go.”

The human flinched. “Ah.”

“Yes, _‘Ah,’_ ” Yamame mocked. “We’re matched two to two; I won’t give you the victory until you give the final point. Give, Paran. Or I’ll forget everything you just said.”

The man pretended a hacking cough. He quit when it found no purchase from the spinstress.

“This is stupid,” he surrendered, “and I hadn’t planned to actually use it—”

“Too late for that now. Give.”

“Very good,” obeyed Paran. “Very good…”

Whatever the reason was (and which Yamame was about to find out), it dictated a pause is taken before, and at least three breaths, so it may be given.

But then it _was_ given, and it took all the air in the room away.

“You stink.”

Had Yamame been born anything else than a spider – say, an Oni, or another stripe of monster with lesser command of its impulses – she could have hung her jaw as wide as the Underworld’s magmatic caverns, then clocked the man who had caused it to so hang. She didn’t. An ambush on the prey’s home ground – this was the spider’s way; and as amazed as this spider was, she remembered this much.

So she ripped the pillow the human had leant on from behind his back. So she flung the same pillow at the human’s face.

The human doubled backwards over the armrest, flopping to the floor to become one more impertinent piece among the ones already there scattered. When he recovered enough to sit up, Yamame socked him again.

The human peeled the pillow from his face. “I told you I hadn’t—”

And a third time.

This marked the limit of the pillows Yamame had sewn for her couch; and the spinstress stood up on legs she now found were decidedly too naked for comfort. The sweat on her skin was rapidly cooling; and against the heat rising in her ears, her body shuddered. This, in turn, pumped the warm air from under the blanket right up in Yamame’s nostrils.

The human had been right. She stank. There was something to say of that; Yamame had been working, had not showered, had been drinking, and finally slept the night in clothing which absorbed no sweat nor bad smell. To say she “stank” was a cruel truth – but a truth all the same.

This in no way kept her from picking up one of the pillows and thwacking the human again as she walked past.

“You win this round, you snake!” she called from her bedroom’s door. “Have it your way. But first put some water on for me. I’m going to shower – if that’s so imperative.”

Her human picked himself up with a bleeding nose.

“Yes…” he grunted. “Will you also eat?”

“I will also eat!” Yamame replied, exasperated. “Watch that blood! You’ll stain the dresses.”

Then she slammed the door of her bedroom, and let the blanket sail to the floor.

In the black silence draping her place of rest (at least on most nights), Yamame allowed herself a single traitorous thought. The human had bested her on the fields of reason – perhaps inevitably – and she had done poorly to play on his terms; but one battle lost did not mean the failure of a war. This, the spinstress swore inside, was her own truth.

Another part of her – a smaller, easily ignored part – wondered what the rest of Yamame had meant. What a monster such as she may gain from sparring with a human. Why the touching – this strange, human kink – licensed so much attention.

After a moment, the part shrugged, deciding it not its business.

* * *

There was a magic to human cookery which dazzled Yamame every time.

At her age, Yamame had partaken of various foods. Across the years she had tried many: game and bird-flesh, eggs and rice-meals, vegetables in the leaner seasons, as well as even more… exotic meats; but as she grew older and more powerful, the spider’s appetite within had diminished. To eat ceased being necessary; instead, the pleasure of tastes and eating had become little more than that – a pleasure. Still, what “little” it was, it made Yamame swoon in delight.

Here were these same foods (eggs and rice and vegetables at least), but modified in ways of names unknown to Yamame. The long age her stove had been used to boil water for showers and mushroom tea only was over; now, meals were coming off of it which made Yamame’s mouth dribble.

She wiped it with a wrist. A seditious thought whispered this wouldn’t last much at all, that – by the week’s end – the perishable foods will have run out, and back it would be to boiled rice for Yamame and her human. At least so it would be until the next job was handed in. There was more treachery here – mostly to do with the Underworld’s architect keeping this part a secret from her associates, and preferring to allocate their wages from the other goods volunteered as their payment – but this indiscretion was one Yamame refused to feel bad about.

After their breakfast had been fully transported to the table, Yamame’s human flumped down on a chair opposite, and began to fork the eggs and rice, and the others, onto a wide plate. The spinstress did the same, with all the haste of someone afraid for the best morsels getting snatched up from under their nose.

The human had not spoken since their bout (or since Yamame had returned damp-haired from the shower), and for all the world saw had slipped back into the tight-lipped rule he’d constructed for himself. But Yamame was armed with new-found insight; and even over the mouth-watering smells filling the kitchen, she could sense a straining – a barely perceptible pull of tension, as their awareness was tugged subversively away from their meal.

Toward what, exactly – this she couldn’t say. But there it was. And before she knew it, she was staring.

“Hey.”

The human didn’t stop eating. “Mm?”

“I said, ‘Hey,’” repeated Yamame.

“… Mm.”

“I’ll take that as a, ‘Yes, Yamame.’ What have you planned for today?” Whatever he had, it failed to communicate in the next few moments. Yamame put down her utensils and picked up a frown. “Hey. Just because you beat me in an argument doesn’t mean you can ignore me for the rest of the day. Paran?”

With a rasp of unoiled sockets, the human Paran tore his eyes from his food. “… That’s not it.”

“What’s not it?”

“I wasn’t… I _hadn’t_ planned anything,” he said, resigned. “Maybe to tidy up. Maybe to read. A day off or no, this is little different for me from when you are out working.”

“But I’m not, today. I’m here.”

“… Yes.”

“Want me to plan something for us both then?”

The man let go of an unthinking chuckle. “As long as it doesn’t involve—” Then his jaw stuck, and his lips screwed up. He blinked it away with some effort. “… As long as it doesn’t involve work,” he muttered finally. “I got very little sleep last night.”

_To no credit of a certain earth spider,_ Yamame completed the accusation. “Something leisurely then?” she offered. “How about an outing?”

The human sighed. “You will do as you please, Yamame.”

“I will, too,” she assured him.

( ) A whole lot of nothing around the house.  
( ) Something in the underground capital.  
( ) Something else in the above-world.


	6. In the ligthouse

(X) Something in the underground capital.

* * *

The decisions had been made in a flash. The more crucial – in half a one, so as not to be disputed; and within the third hour since the flash, Yamame Kurodani was standing on the craggy basalt flats girdling the underground capital. The gem of the Underworld was twinkling in the distance; varicoloured lights shone, touching off the mineral-rich walls of the cyclopean vault that housed the city. Towers of gold – multi-tiered, bisected by traditional curved roofs at each tier’s beginning – were even now visible; for these were the lighthouses of the capital, around which other buildings were singularly huddled, to bask in their magickal radiance.

A human was squinting at these wondrous sights, just beside Yamame, and fuming. The fumes were a confused blend of alarm and acceptance.

The decisions had been made in a flash – but none bright enough to stun the human’s unremitting self-preservation; and, as Yamame had presented her idea, it had been met with a fierce and lengthy opposition.

“This is a bad idea.”

As lengthy, anyway, as anything of Paran went.

Though Yamame had put forward her best assertion and no mistake. She had guaranteed the safety of her human, and if this safety was to be compromised – justice on the offender: of a name so long and alien, the mere mention had set the man off coughing. At length, oddly inappropriate for himself, Paran had been finally convinced. Thusly, the two had completed their meal. Thusly, they donned the better of their clothes. Thusly, they walked the winding tunnels of Yamame’s domain, down and down and down, until the caves had opened, and the capital’s great dome unfolded from the endless stone.

Now it had, Yamame had quit goading her human to give and tell what additional embarrassment her drunken self had been, and focused wholly on the problem at hand. The hand, which she now extended to Paran.

“Come over here.”

The man obeyed; then, he dis-obeyed when Yamame looped her arm around his. “ _Yamame,_ ” he hissed. “We _talked_ about this. Just this morning.”

Yamame extended her hand – again. “We talked about _you_ touching _me_ ,” she pointed out. “Not the reverse.”

“That’s sophistry—”

“And this,” she chopped his counterpoint in half, “is for your safety. We aren’t bound by the same laws here as protect you on the surface. If we can make it very plain you are mine – and not a vagabond tumbled down here on some random jaunt – then we should do so. With our chests puffed, and faces very serious.”

“And our hands clasped?” said Paran, qualms puffed, and face very dubious.

For a moment, Yamame joined him in frowning. “What? No, not hands. That’s for greetings, isn’t it? The arms—” here she attempted to loop her own arms around each other – only to find the number of joints woefully lacking, “—um, anyway… The arms – the Oni here hold them like this, coiled, when they are together: keg-brothers especially, and especially after drinking – so that you know you are fighting both if you challenge either. It’s become something of a symbol. Some of my co-workers as well; they’ve taken to doing it if they absolutely don’t want to be persuaded a stair needs to be laid again, or the roof tiles re-set. Altogether infuriating, when it happens. Well, but not in this case, since this is—”

“For my own safety,” nodded Paran. “… Very good.”

Then he shuffled close, and offered himself to be re-leashed. _And a victory, however small – for me,_ thought Yamame, taking her human by the relinquished arm, and pulling the rest of him closer. The human winced – once. Then he was still.

He was decidedly less still once they began walking again – even less when they found their paces grossly mismatched; yet after the first forty or so steps spent wobbling and jostling against each other, a much-welcome compromise was mercifully forged. Yamame had to rather stretch her paces – and her human curtail his – but nowhere beyond either of their tolerances. Another forty steps, and almost their walking kept to a straight line. Another – and they were walking lines like champions.

“A couple pointers,” Yamame said at this point. “As I said just then, we aren’t bound by the same compacts our brothers and sisters above are. There are few who entertain the Spell-Card Rule down here outside of necessity, and those are deemed eccentrics at the more generous. Not without some foundation do the surface _youkai_ call the Underworld a ‘lawless district.’ We Underfolk aren’t elementally hostile, mind – but a fight every now and then does get our blood running, and some of us have a lot of blood to run. So if you must issue any challenges while down here, make them ones you can back up with brawn.”

“My brawn or yours?”

Yamame giggled at the question. “Yours, of course. Nobody wants to fight _me_ in the earnest.”

“Why?”

“The diseases – remember?”

“… Sorry,” said the human. “I tend to forget.”

The comment caused a strange, warm feeling to slowly creep up Yamame’s neck. The feeling settled on her cheeks in the end, and the spinstress – second time she was late to realise today – became aware she was blushing.

“That—” she pushed the words out, “That… felt really good, for some reason… even if you were making a joke at my expense,” she added. “It’s gratifying to know my existence isn’t boiled down to that single attribute – really, really gratifying. You wouldn’t believe how much… Please, forget more often. As often as you can. Please.”

“… I’ll try,” said Paran, “but I could use your help.”

“I’ll try as well,” promised Yamame, risking everything by tightening the hold on her human’s arm. No reaction came – which was perhaps the best reaction she could hope for presently. Yamame took it at its full worth. “I’ll try all right… Anyway,” she resumed, “here’s another piece of advice. This’ll be a new sort of affair to you, so I imagine you’ll be doing a spider’s share of staring; but do keep eye contact at a low, if you can find the restraint. Many of those living here may regard it as a challenge; they will want to fight you. They won’t, of course, and you needn’t fear them – I am here after all – but do try not to stare _too_ much anyway. This isn’t _setsubun_ , and we aren’t Oni-hunting. As much amusing as it’d be to chase down Oni with a human, I don’t need that sort of excitement today. I just want to spend some easy time – with you.”

“Hear, hear,” muttered Paran. “Hear, hear…”

And this made Yamame giggle again. “That’s the way to be.”

A pearly grin spread all the way across her cheeks, glowing brighter somehow than the golden towers ahead.

“Now!” she said, “nose up and eyes level, and do look good for me. Here come the first houses. We’ll be passing through this quarter, and making for the eastern lighthouse. That’s the closest one, by the way, so don’t sulk. There’s someone there I want you to meet.”

* * *

Yamame had always quietly hated the capital.

A wide channel formed immediately from the outermost housings: one among a myriad slapdash roads threading through the city’s chaotic clumps of homes and establishments. To either side of the channel, open-terraced and inviting, houses of the Oni and other Underfolk were being rowdily occupied; some – and on these Yamame looked with a pang of longing – already had guests lounging, drinking and playing games with noisy relish, despite the early hour. At least by the spinstress’s internal gauge; little good would it do to speak of an early hour in a city of perpetual light and revelry, such as the underground capital.

When Yamame had first been ushered into this chamber, at the set of an era, it had not been half so bright. A smattering of huts had clustered squat atop a mountain of rubble; a collection of torches and bonfires was all which lit the ruins of the former home of the Yama, blazed and torn down in a terrible war Yamame knew little of, and cared even less to learn. The Oni – and others – were hunched about these bonfires, looking for the first and last time in history so lost, so dazed, almost the earth spider shed a tear for these stranded souls.

So she had mustered the mightiest voice she had. So she had called on the Oni to stand tall once more. So she had cast their minds toward the future, stocked with light and glory, which she – the cleverest among the spiders – would single-handedly design. Within the day foundations had been lain for the first lighthouse, and scavenger teams sent out to strip the ruins of workable material. Within the week, the first tier had been opened to use, and the first party held in celebration. Within the month, the Underworld had received its own miniature Sun, perched atop a sturdy tower jointly wrought by the hands of unlikely allies cast away deep beneath the earth. And of course, the Oni partied again.

Yamame had not _always_ hated the capital. Yet when the city she’d helped deliver from oblivion had over the innumerable years phased her out in lieu of the Oni and their own slant on architecture, “always” became the natural shorthand. The slant was burning away at Yamame’s sensibilities even now, as she guided her human along streets more twisted than snakes, with more dead ends than the human’s conversation skills. The sheer drunken disregard for spatial conventions made the great architect’s palms itch.

Still she smiled against it all when a familiar building popped out from behind a turn as sensible as a web inside a lockbox.

“That there is the bathhouse,” she told the man beside her. “The best in the capital – and one of the first ones incidentally. We aren’t going in right now, of course – but just in case, it’s right here.”

“… Right.”

“Just in case,” she teased, “if you find you can’t recall where it was, just follow the first tired-looking Oni until they either pass out in the middle of the street, or arrive here. This is the easier way. Or so I hear, anyway.”

“What’s the harder?”

“Follow a _dirty_ -looking Oni, and hope they’re bound here, and not straight to their bed.”

A huge, red-skinned Oni passing them by chortled at the overheard jab. Then he veered off the road, and clambered up the short stair to the bathhouse.

“… As has been demonstrated,” said Paran, once the horned giant was out of earshot.

“As has been demonstrated,” giggled Yamame. “Very good, too. You did smell that, didn’t you?”

The human scrunched up his face. “I did.”

“Behold: the mighty Oni. Mighty is their strength, and mightier their aroma. Now, you can smell pretty bad after a day of work yourself – but even then you can’t hope to match _this_ bouquet.”

“… Thanks,” he murmured.

“You smell fine right now, though,” Yamame comforted. “Very, very fine. So no need to go wash up.”

“… Mm.”

They continued on.

* * *

Another thousand or so turns and twists, and they stood before the rune-embossed doors of the eastern lighthouse.

Here, at the foot of the tower, the illumination was so strong that Yamame’s human had to physically shield his eyes – as he would from the Sun in the world above. With the gentle guidance of the tower’s maker, they approached the door… and crossed the threshold.

The interior was dim and cool; and as the door shut behind them, Paran slipped out of Yamame’s grasp, scanning about the surroundings. Maybe by the shift in space, but Yamame felt her body seize up as though chilled. The sudden _absence_ of the warmth at her side was more startling someway than its presence may ever have been. Almost, and she would have leapt forward to catch her human again; but then, a powerful sense of nostalgia washed over the spinstress, overpowering everything else.

All at once she was transported an eon into the past, when the grand lobby of the first tower crowded with a people so recently liberated from exile, the purest concept of a “new home” made them throw their arms around one another in jubilation. Hats – and other articles – were thrown joyously up into the shaft over the heart of the lobby, where – high in the gloom – a _shinbashira_ of massive proportions, carven from the only surviving pillar of the Yamas’ palace, hung on titanic steel links from the ceiling like a pendulum. The device, in a turn of irony so poetic Yamame had laughed devising it, protected the lighthouse from any violent geological activity by dampening the forces which may threaten its integrity. Around the _shinbashira_ , tiers after tiers after tiers of floors were rising up and up, each enough to provide several families an ample living space with amenities. A single of these towers could house a third of the capital’s population, with room to spare.

No one lived here now.

The vast lobby was host only to dust and silence, and a few flowerbeds of strange, crimson roses – a gift from Old Hell’s vicereine, Satori Komeiji, upon her assuming the ungrateful station. The roses were struggling in the shadowy indoors; but even after all the years, hope was at work: through nursing and care, a healthy population still decorated the site of Yamame’s greatest creation. Whose care, and whose nursing – this became self-evident when a hulking silhouette cut away from the shadows ahead, rising to meet the intruders to the house.

Rising to meet Yamame and her human.

“Aah—” A smoky exhalation issued from the monster’s maw. A distant whiff of pipe-grass stung Yamame’s nostrils. “Who interrupts the work of an elder? No one after a black eye, I hope!”

“No one!” called Yamame, failing to suppress a smile, “but an earth spider lost to the world. Come to indulge an old devil’s company.”

A deep, rumbling sound vibrated the air of the lobby. The monster had laughed.

“The wayward child returns,” it boomed.

“ _Nikuyama,_ ” chided Yamame, at the end of her bridle, “stop these theatrics and come on out. It’s been too long to play at rituals.”

Another thundering laugh rocked the foundations of the tower. “It is precisely because it has been long, that some ritual is required. Still, it is the duty of us Oni to keep the younger, less enduring races from exploding with impatient fluids. Very good, then.”

With an exaggerated roar of effort the Oni stood whence it had been hunching, behind the lobby’s front desk. A giant, the very colour of the flowers he tended, rose ponderously halfway to the next floor. A pair of horns, angled like an ox’s, crowned the Oni’s triangular head; below, under the jutting brows and the knobby nose, two mimic tusks were thrusting out its lower jaw – giving it the savage appearance which so stoked the fear of humans in the world above. The shoulders of this monster were cloaked in a grand nobleman’s robe – stretched now, and frayed from long use – upon whose chest a rune had been described in faded gold: “Administrator.”

Unable to contain herself any longer, Yamame raced forward with a happy squeal. The Oni deftly caught her as she jumped in his meatloaf arms, and the two shared an embrace, the like of which lost friends give each other upon reunion.

Yamame laughed when the Oni spun her around. “Niku! Long time!”

“Yes, yes, little Yamame,” replied the giant. “Long time, indeed.”

The Oni set down the grinning spinstress. Then, his attention shifted to the other odd element in the room.

“Ah,” Yamame remembered. “Niku, this is my new informant.” She skipped over to her human’s side. “He handles jobs for me on the surface, which is what I’ve been busying myself with as of late. Paran, this is Nikuyama – my old informant. Used to handle jobs for me here, in the Underworld, before my undeserved falling out of fashion… Paran? Hello?”

The human – who had watched until now from the safe likeness of a statue – snapped to attention.

“What?” he said to Yamame.

The spinstress opened her mouth to tell him _what_ – only then, Nikuyama shooed her aside, taking the processions into his giant’s hands.

“Nikuyama,” the Oni said, reaching out one of the blood-red arms. “Caretaker of the eastern lighthouse, which you stand in now. Also caretaker of Yamame – long ago.”

At this proclamation – or perhaps beside it – the human glanced over at Yamame. Then he obliged the reply. “… Paranseberi,” he surrendered, grasping the Oni’s wrist, and allowing his own to be grasped back.

Though more accurately he _laid_ his hand flat on the Oni’s wrist, while his own was engulfed in return; but Paran suffered the indignity with his own brand of stoicism. The Paran-brand. Then, as though a thought occurring unbidden, his eyes narrowed with a question.

The Oni Nikuyama answered. “Nothing more.”

This didn’t appear to satisfy the human; but still he inclined his head in thanks, and backed out of the handshake with a bow, as propriety dictated.

All of this Yamame had taken in with swelling amusement, which presently overflowed in laugh that bent her upper half over.

“What’s little Yamame finding so humorous now?” asked the Oni, lifting one oxen brow.

Yamame clapped a hand across her mouth to stem the laughter. It ended up sputtering between her fingers instead. She laughed harder at this result. “No— It’s just— Just yesterday—” she gasped out, “Just yesterday— Oh my… Just yesterday, me and Paran, we had a huge – a huge disagreement, you know? Over how these things worked. And here— here you go, just doing it, like it’s the most natural thing in the world.”

The two males looked at each other.

“Isn’t it?” asked Nikuyama.

Paran said nothing.

Yamame waved the topic away like the one fly too many. “Never mind. It’s just me – I’m laughing at very important matters. My bad, Niku.” She patted the Oni on the log-like forearm. Then, she urged the giant to follow her to the back of the lobby. “Come, now – let’s sit down and catch up! I’ve been up to _so many_ fun things lately. You absolutely won’t believe. You too,” she told Paran. “Come. I’m going to need your input. Chop-chop, you two! Come on, before I rope you.”

* * *

Yamame didn’t rope them. Nor did she need either of their input; for all the output she offered on her own, she made up for it with interest.

A long hour had slid by, that Yamame spoke over vigorously of her latest pursuits – the above-world’s architecture, the challenges and rewards it yielded – and the Oni Nikuyama had listened to it all, sucking on his pipe with forbearing curiosity. Only at one point Yamame had broken off – dipping into the pockets of her dress, which turned out a modest packet wrapped in oiled paper.

“This was included in one of my payments,” she had said, tossing it over to the Oni. “Neither I nor Paran smoke, so you can have it. Good I remembered, hmm?”

As for the human, so offhandedly mentioned, he had sat – and did so even now – beside the two old friends, never speaking; only he bored his eyes into the animating Yamame, whose full favour had been given over to her stories. An unreadable man was this Paran, pickling under a double layer of his usual disincline to conversation; but for the moment Yamame’s attention lay in another direction altogether. So Paran pickled.

At the end of the hour, it was the Oni, of all of them, who put up a stopping hand.

“This is all rightly fascinating now,” he told the pouting Yamame, “but your voice is going hoarse, little one. Care maybe for a break?”

“My voice isn’t going _hoarse!_ ” Yamame protested.

“Must be the smoke,” Nikuyama mused despite her, “which I guess is my fault, at that. You must wet your throat before it gives out, little one. You’re going to need it for work. A cup of mushroom tea should do. Paranseberi, good fellow,” he addressed the human, “would you mind terribly if you could fetch the tea urn from the desk? I left it there yesterday. I’ll dredge up the tea in the meanwhile; it should be around here somewhere.”

Paran rode his chair away from the table and stood up. “… Very good.”

“Thank you,” Nikuyama managed, before the human slipped out through the break room’s door.

As soon as he was out, Yamame breathed in to resume her story; but here was the Oni, locking her with a stare so hard her words lodged in her throat. _Maybe I_ could _use some tea,_ she thought.

“Yamame Kurodani,” said the giant, stern as a general before a platoon of recruits. “You are as graceful a spider as our lady Yuugi is at a dish of _sake_.”

Yamame blinked. “… Thank you?”

“That was a joke,” Nikuyama rumbled. Then he leaned forward, lowering his voice. “Listen to me, little spider, and listen well. I fear no enemy, for I am the fear in the hearts of men; but what I _do_ fear is making enemies I don’t need nor want. You must tell your new companion I’m nothing more than your once caretaker – and soon.”

“Huh?” Yamame’s head titled on its own. “What do you mean? You told him so when you met, right? I got that much.”

“My little Yamame, you’re as green as your birth-day if you believe we men are so easily pacified.” The Oni _tock_ ed his pipe on the ash-tray set before him on the table. “Tell him, little one. He is sooner to listen to the pretty you than a gnarled old Oni with a tobacco problem to boot. Just tell him. You’ll save us both trouble in the long run.”

The spider’s brows squeezed together at the discrediting words. “Why?”

“Trust me,” insisted the Oni.

( ) Trust the Oni.  
( ) The Oni speaks nonsense.


	7. Chapter 7

(X) Trust the Oni.

Never so much as pausing to think it over, Yamame gave her answer.

“I trust you,” she said, “I really do; but I won’t suffer anyone to call you old or gnarled – even if it’s yourself doing the calling.”

The Oni Nikuyama – who would not be less gnarled than if he were a hundred-year-old oak – spat a rockslide chuckle at this fierce defiance of reality. “Tuck in your fangs, little Yamame,” he advised. “It’s a figure of speech – nothing more. A touch of self-deprecation goes a long way. It is called ‘humility.’ Are you familiar with that word, little one? ‘Humility?’”

“Does it have to do with being humiliated?”

“It has to do with being _humble_. It’s something you learn when someone finally shunts you from the top of the food chain.”

A shadow passed over Nikuyama’s features – as much as one can pass over a face whose curvature was permanently latticed with shadows. Then, the Oni, shrugging out of this darkness spell, stuck his pipe in his mouth, and rose mountainously from his chair. Yamame looked on her red-skinned guardian (or once-guardian) as he walked over to retrieve an ornate tea casket from one of the shelves. The casket vanished into Nikuyama’s administrator robe, and the spinstress quit attempting to guess what was going on.

“Niku? What are you doing?”

But if the Oni had ever meant to explain, he made short work of it. “Now, little spider, I can’t steer you through _every_ walk of life,” he said instead, “and not this one, especially. But for all it’s worth, I’ve got full confidence in your legwork.”

“My legwork?”

“That, or your looks if all else fails. You’re already in a much better position than I ever was. Albeit you stand to become as wrinkled as I am if you keep up that frown.”

Yamame scowled. “Niku!”

The Oni made as though about to release another earthquake laugh to the break room’s cool air.

But the first boulders never rolled. Nikuyama pulled them back with herculean strength. And none too soon; for then the exiting door swung open to admit a very laden Paran, huffing and puffing underneath a tea urn more fit to be a beer-keg than a tea-drinker’s best little friend.

The Oni Nikuyama produced (and this Yamame marked an operative word) an apologetic gasp.

“Ah, _damnation!_ That was full? Hold on, let me—” With one wheel-span hand, Nikuyama relieved the human of the urn. “So sorry about that,” he rumbled. “We’re going to have to pour this out. No, you sit down and wait. I’m the host; I’ll handle the rest.”

“… Have you found the tea?” the human panted dutifully. “I can look if—”

“It’s _going to be_ in the kitchen,” assured the Oni. “You sit and rest. Spirits below… What is going on with my head today? First I’m gnarled; now it’s senility setting in. What a fate…”

And grumbling on the slippery turns of old age, the giant rolled out into the tower’s great lobby. The door _click_ ed shut behind him with un-Oni-like softness. Almost un-door-like as well, in Yamame’s ears – but perhaps this was the doing of those same ears filling with distressed heat, now she had been left suddenly alone with her human.

The human’s ears, if they were similarly rebelling, didn’t prevent him from calmly reacquiring his seat at the table. Which wouldn’t have happened anyway, as humans didn’t rely so much on hearing as they did on sight; in this, Yamame was certain she was right. What was she thinking of, then – bats? To be sure not of humans. Which she _should have_ been. The problem here wasn’t a bat at all. It was a human.

And this human was refusing to cooperate already. Whatever tiny hope Yamame had nurtured to right the matters peaceably, now it was dashed on invisible ramparts the man had raised around himself from wilful silence. Through these ramparts, and off to the side, he was staring now, an empty stare – completely ignorant of the fast agitating Yamame.

_Very_ fast. The heat in her ears was reaching boiling point; and, like the tea urn would be within minutes if the Oni handled it right, Yamame soon puffed hot steam.

“Niku is _just my caretaker,_ ” she snapped.

The human Paran peeked cautiously over the battlements of his see-through fortress. “What?”

“Nikuyama,” Yamame repeated, squeezing her fists, “is just my _once caretaker._ When I was first brought here to the Underworld, he hovered at my side and tempered my relations with the other Oni. Then, once I was settled in, he ensured I had a steady schedule, and people of the capital – timely assistance. At least, when I was still needed.” The spinstress swallowed a bead of indignation. “As you have your ways with your human brothers and sisters, so the Oni required someone to mediate their needs to me. Someone who understood them, as well as they understood themselves. And Nikuyama offered. My point is, though, that he’s just that – someone who maintained my social standing in the capital. Nothing more, nothing less. Just a once caretaker.”

Two expressions vied on the human face at this – which was already thrice as much as the rule.

At length, he murmured, “… I knew that.”

And this brought Yamame over the tip.

“Then why did you have to be told twice?!” she yelled, shooting up and knocking back her chair. The chair clattered to the side with an offended note. “Here I introduced you to an old associate of mine, crossing my fingers you would _bond_ over your lines of work! Here I stole _just a few minutes_ to do some catching up that was well-late anyway! And what do you do? What do you do?”

“Yamame—”

“You _plop_ yourself in that chair,” she cut him off, “you _plop_ yourself down, you _dig_ your heels in, and you _bare_ your teeth at someone who is _no more_ than my old friend, _all behind my back!_ Never mind doing it from behind my back, actually; Nikuyama is _an Oni!_ A twice-aged one, but still an Oni! What were you going to do? Glare holes in him? You were doing that already, too!”

“I wasn’t going to do anything,” grunted the human.

“Anything _else_ , you mean!” corrected Yamame. “From what he said, you were already spreading hostilities so hard he felt necessary to notify me. Why? Are you _so_ loath to Oni? You greeted him just fine, too. You stomach being around _me_ – and we’re both acquainted with just how far that goes outside human custom. So why? An Oni or no, Niku’s as delicate as a hatchling. He never hurt you in any way, shape or form. He never once _looked_ at you wrong. And you _wounded_ him. Why, Paran? What for?”

Her human shut his eyes and pressed on them with two fingers – a gesture so closely familiar, Yamame’s anger pulsed.

“Yamame,” groaned the human, “let’s be reasonable—”

_Oh no,_ thought Yamame. _Not anymore._ Already she had been scalded once being “reasonable;” now it was on her own territory she would conduct this hunt. On her own territory – and her own conditions. The first of which was to smash a menacing fist on the table top.

To smash it, and try not to startle at the pain.

“… No,” she said as soon as she trusted her voice not to hike. “I don’t want to be reasonable. I want answers. And if I judge these answers lacking, I want an apology. To me and Niku both. So give, Paran. What is so offensive about my _once caretaker_ , that warrants a quiet war behind my back?”

“… I wasn’t—” began the human.

“You _were_ ,” Yamame told him. “You so were.”

“I _was_ ,” Paran admitted grudgingly, “but not what you think.”

“So enlighten me. What-ever _were_ you?”

The human groaned. “I was… surprised, at how familiar you were with him.”

Yamame snorted. “What’s so surprising about me being familiar with an old friend? Was I supposed to act as though I’d met him for the first time? What sense would that be? Niku and I raised this city together, with our hands and hearts joined. Same as you and I have built some wonderful things up above. The very least I should do for him is act familiar – as I do with you, incidentally.”

“… You _embraced_ him.”

Yamame shook her head, irritated. The human wasn’t looking, but she did it anyway. “And what, pray tell, is so incredible about old friends embracing? An embrace, a hug, is a gesture of respect. Of camaraderie. The Oni here do it all the time – even more often when drunk. Don’t humans? At the least you are aware what it entails. Why, I’ve _offered_ to hug you,” she remembered, “no longer ago than yesterday. And, may I remind you, it seemed as though it was the last thing you wanted in your mortal life – even if you did then do everything in your power to earn it.”

“That’s not the problem, Yamame.”

“Then what is? That I didn’t bite? Oh, please!” The spinstress made a derisive laugh. “The Oni are more robust by halves than you frail humans; any disease I may have channelled in shock would have done nothing to Niku. Maybe give him a throat-ache at most. Maybe enough to force him to reconsider lighting that pipe. Might be worth a future visit, actually. At any rate, I wouldn’t have bit him anyway. And did you know why?” Yamame breathed in. “Because I’m not a slave to my instincts. Because I’m not an animal. Because I’m a sentient being: with higher drives, emotions, and control. And did you know something else? I would never have bit you, either – even if you see me as nothing more but a dumb earth spider with not a speck of self-discipline.”

And then, a bold and unexpected smile tugging at her lips, she added, “And you may be right after all.”

What else could the human do, but rip the damned hand away from his face and gape at the inexorably closing Yamame? Yamame had hoped nothing; and in a streak of fortune so rare today, these hopes were for once fulfilled. The human’s invisible fortress was as good as immaterial; Yamame barrelled through as if it were never there. A step yet, and she stamped to a halt, just beside its builder. Outmatched in height in this arrangement, the sitting human stared up at the spinstress, who reflected in his eyes with the marked look of a woman with a great idea on her mind.

And the idea was this:

“Stand up.”

Too complex for the human’s faculties, it seemed. “What?”

“Stand up, Paran,” said Yamame. “Talking is very fine, and I’d talk the afternoon away with you any day – except today. Today, I’m tired of talking. So, I’m going to apply my final argument directly. Therefore,” she told him sweetly, “what you’re going to do for me now, is you’re going to stand up. Then, I’m going to put my arms around you and embrace you. Then, I’m going to win this stupid argument by _not_ employing my teeth in any part of the above. And then, Paran, you’re going to toss this bizarre biting fixation out of your head once and for all. Any questions?”

“Yamame, that’s a bad—”

“Firstly, that isn’t a question. Secondly, it’s a very good idea, and one I’m exclusively proud of. Once more: any questions? No? Then stand up – right now. Or it’s a world of regret for you.”

The human twitched on his chair. To Yamame, the image was uncomfortably (or maybe comfortably) close to a fly twitching about caught in a web. And then…

And then, miracle of miracles, gods-sent under the earth, the human rose on visibly failing knees.

A hand went again to his face – a face he kept turned away and flushed (though perhaps not intentionally on the latter) from the waiting Yamame. A moment still, and his mouth hinged open to speak.

“… Not a question,” he muttered, “but one thing to say. Please.”

Yamame nodded. Then, she startled at how eagerly she’d done so. Then, remembering she was the one in charge, she conditioned, “Ten words or less, though.”

Her human paused – presumably to rearrange the wording of the one thing he wished said. At length, it seemed without having been rearranged at all, the thing was released. “… In human culture,” sighed Paran, “an embrace between a man and a woman… it’s not a sign of respect, or camaraderie – but of _affection._ You know this… yes?”

Yamame did not know this.

Yamame, in fact, found her face copying the human’s in attiring a pretty pink; but for everything salvageable in this situation, she kept the rest of herself as smooth and composed as Old Hell’s hated vicereine was – on those exceptional occasions she appeared in public. An irony Satori Komeiji, with her unique gift, would very likely appreciate.

“So what?” said Satori Komeiji (or was it Yamame Kurodani?), with a toss of her head. “Are you saying you don’t want to hug me, then?”

The hand on Paran’s face raked. With how hard the rest of Paran squirmed, Yamame wondered how it had not drawn blood.

And finally, the most terrible secret of all was unveiled.

“… No,” said Paran. “I’m not saying that. I want to. I want to hug you. And that – _that_ – is the problem.”

* * *

It was the second time Yamame had been hugged inside the day, but it may well have been another lifetime altogether.

All his secrets laid bare, and all counter-points issued, little had there remained for the human, but to fall in and heed – very closely – the final argument of Yamame Kurodani. The argument had begun clumsily, not at all surprisingly to either of them; but once Yamame had clamped a hold on her thrashing senses (more so since recent revelations), the argument had transitioned into a quiet middle stage, where the spinstress focused entirely on breathing in and out at a frequency that was neither conspicuously fast, nor too awkwardly slow. There was no way to tell how good an impression she was making; her human had, to Yamame’s unwilling relief, not commented. Nor had he let go.

Yamame felt trapped. A piece of her clenched inside her abdomen at the very thought, but it was a mistaken piece. Yamame felt trapped – and yet, perversely to everything she had known in her life as a spider, she did not want to escape. _Not yet, anyway,_ thought the spinstress, to no disapproving instinct in particular. _A minute more. Or two. Or ten. Then we’ll see._

“Yamame?”

“… Hmm?”

“… You’re clawing.”

_Maybe just one, then,_ thought Yamame, relaxing her fingers. As though in response, the hand rested on the small of her back quit pushing as hard as it had been. The one on her left shoulder blade, however – this one was still going strong.

And so it kept, until the end of the minute (or the second one, or another yet) came pulling. Only after a moment the spinstress realised it was not the flow of time pulling – but the hands, which had relocated to her sides. Almost retracting the decision as soon as it had been made, she allowed herself to be ripped away from her human.

The Yamame who returned his blushed stare must have been a disordered one. For then he asked uncertainly:

“… Yamame? Are you all right?”

“I’m… OK,” admitted Yamame.

“All right then… Yamame?”

“What is it?”

“Did… Did that – all of that – feel good for you at all?”

_Too good, for what it was._ “It felt… OK,” she said, drawing a lock of hair behind an ear. “I didn’t bite you, did I?”

The human considered the evidence. “No,” he granted. “I’m still alive.”

_And warm,_ Yamame added inside. The thought stuck, confused between her spider shape, and her two-legged one. “Yes. Alive…” she murmured. “… Why are you asking?”

This time it was the man who had to work on an answer. “… It’s just,” he said, eyes defocusing, “I wasn’t sure— I didn’t know if earth spiders liked… being touched.”

_We don’t,_ thought one Yamame. “I do,” said the other, the recently touched one. “Just… Just not too suddenly. I’m… OK with it then. Very, very OK.”

“‘Very OK?’”

“Very OK,” she nodded. And then, recovering a few scattered threads of dignity, she asked, “And you? Did that feel good at all – embracing an earth spider?”

The human’s answering expression belied the answer itself.

“It felt very OK,” he said.

* * *

Thirty seconds hence – and these were seconds too even to be natural – the door once more rasped open, yielding a hunched Oni. On the Oni’s shoulder, knocking on the door frame as he came through, a _barrel_ of a tea urn was precariously wobbling to and fro. The red giant landed it with a heavy _donk_ on the table. The table complained audibly of this abuse.

“Sorry for that,” said the Oni, it seemed to his guests as well as the table.

_Thirty seconds._ Not near enough to catch a misplaced composure, but plenty to sketch a functional likeness of one – which Yamame had given to with a spider’s alacrity. The human Paran – whose own composure must have been a poorer runner – moved in to assist Nikuyama with the drinks sooner than Yamame had figured the same idea out herself.

“Ah, thank you, thank you,” rumbled the Oni, like gravel pouring down a quarry wall. At the same time, he poured the tea into the first cup with a push on the urn’s lever. Then, he passed the cup on prudently to the human. “For our little spider, yes?” he said.

Paran inclined his head. “Yes.”

Something else than the tea passed between the males, which Yamame’s mental framework caught but struggled to fit. Acceptance? Approval? But the pass was complete, and the framework had to be switched to other tasks, some equally strenuous. One of those: receiving the cup at a want of spilling the contents over.

“Cheers,” murmured the spinstress.

The thanks, if they had been heard, went unacknowledged, and Yamame slid down onto a chair while watching her human turn away to assist the Oni once more. Already the second cup was being slowly filled in a puff of steam, leaving but one set aside to wait – Nikuyama’s favourite, wide and tall enough to be a tea urn unto itself. Once given his share, the human was unceremoniously prodded away by the Oni, who next went on to fill the last remaining cup – or urn – with undisguised relish. The filling was taking its time.

Yamame looked down.

A puzzled earth spider looked back from the swarthy depths of her tea.

_Something_ had been unlocked here; yet what the something _was_ proved a more difficult enquiry to the spinstress. A word had to exist for it; and if Yamame had to consult the less treaded paths of her memory to find it, so she would. The trouble was, even those were turning up nothing – not at the end of this minute, nor the next. Nor the one following.

At length, spent mostly breathing in the milky steam, the spinstress realised forlornly the answer was one of those prey which must come to her on their own. Not otherwise. To hound at it would do little more than give her a headache; and even if the same head was now itching with frustration, the spider heart inside her chest was a patient hunter. It could wait. It has before.

Yamame buoyed the cup up to her mouth. Then she _hiss_ ed when the tea very nearly burnt off the tip of her tongue.

_Yes,_ nothing _if not patient._

A quieter minute opened out like a parasol over the three in the break room, each contesting again and again the temperature of their drink; each – singularly failing the duel every time. Only when Yamame was positive hers had cooled enough to be less than magma-hot, did she dare to take a full, experimental sip.

The tea wasn’t very good.

All at once she was sorely missing her own tea-box, stashed atop the shelf in the kitchen of her little house. A _tea_ -box – with _tea leaves_ inside – not mushroom caps dried and sliced in a miserable approximate. How did the Oni here abide on these alone? How had she, before these recent months? How was her human doing it even now – rolling the drink in his mouth and never crooking a brow?

These questions milked away as the steam had, when Nikuyama spoke up.

“Now then, little Yamame,” he said, his giant’s hands knotted under his chin, “I believe you were telling us about this… _Inari_ temple of late. What was wrong with the beams, again? You sounded mighty put off with those.”

A reminder of work – this was the last missing piece of the rug which _a certain human_ had pulled out from under her feet very recently. Now the rug was whole again; and Yamame – feet once more firmly planted – began telling again what and why was wrong with the beams – in detail. The detail was great and professional.

The Oni Nikuyama, having absorbed the detail (and appropriately harrumphed at it all), steered the conversation onto hazier terrain for Yamame next – inquiring after the side of her projects on a rule handled exclusively by Paran. To the architect’s limitless wonder, her human set down his half-full cup, and began a thorough – if subdued – account of his experience with Yamame’s latest client. The account was none too complimentary. Nikuyama, of course, harrumphed appropriately.

At the tail end of the afternoon (or perhaps the dry end of the tea), it was the Oni who unsubtly suggested his duties were crying after attention. So Yamame and her human stood up from their empty cups. So they bade to the red giant a heartfelt good-bye which, under circumstance from hours before, would likely have been impossible. So they left, arm-in-arm again, the silenced tower and its aged custodian.

As she was gently leading back down the meandering streets of the capital, Yamame felt the human at her side steadying himself to speak. The steadying lasted a while (or about four streets, by this measure); and by the time it was done the spinstress found herself impressed by the human’s ability to dig himself in while still keeping a reasonable pace.

“What is it?” she asked, before he ended up tripping them both. “Something on your mind?”

The human steadied the final bit before securing a reply.

“… Yamame?” he said.

Yamame giggled. “Yes, that’s my given name. Thank you.” The personal joke satisfied, she tugged encouragingly on his arm. “Come on. What’s on your mind? Aside from my name, of course. That we’ve already established.”

“… A question.”

“Only one? From the wait I thought there might be more.”

“Maybe.”

“Well, let’s start with the first one, then,” Yamame decided. “What is it?”

Her human waited till the gaggle of visibly (and aurally) inebriated Oni waddling by was well without a rumour’s leap. Then, he voiced the first of the many questions (maybe) infesting his head.

“… Why did you have me come here with you, really? To this alien place?”

Yamame knitted her brows. “To see Niku,” she said. “Obviously. We just did, didn’t we? I didn’t just dream it all, right?”

“Well, no,” coughed Paran, a corner of his hard-wrought steadiness chipping away. “That’s all, then? You wanted to see an old caretaker? With me?”

“… No,” admitted Yamame. “Maybe… Maybe I wanted you to feel a bit trapped. To take you outside of your web, so to say. To shake you up a little. Maybe.”

“Why?”

“So you depended on me… I think.” The Underworld’s great architect gave a small, helpless chuckle. “I don’t know! It’s been altogether too often I’ve had to… think… about my actions and their reasoning lately. I’m not used to it. I don’t know that I like it, either. I’m not very good at it. I’m just a dumb earth spider, after all… right?”

The human winced at the jab. “You aren’t dumb, Yamame.”

“No?” Yamame craned her neck up. “Then pray tell what am I?”

“… Misinformed,” surrendered Paran, mouth all screwed up. “Not your fault. A cultural difference, is all. Nothing more.”

“Then there’s hope for me yet?”

“We’ll… see. But,” the human pulled that topic before it may root, “you wanted me to… depend on you, yes? Is that it?”

“Yes.” Yamame nodded. “I guess I did, at that. Maybe I was still hurting inside from this morning. Maybe. I don’t want to have to mull over it too much. I just want the one responsible to… to depend on me. To _trust me._ That’s all I’m asking. That’s really all.”

There was a pause as the two passed by the bathhouse they had seen on their way to the lighthouse.

Then, in a quiet voice which conveyed more world-weariness somehow than suitable for his years, the human said:

“… I’ve been dependent on you for a long time, Yamame.”

This time, when the spinstress pulled his arm down, it was reprimanding. “That’s fine, and you’re fine for saying so – but _a few months_ isn’t a long time at all, Paran.”

“No,” he agreed. “It isn’t.”

Another moment, and the human was shaking his head weakly left and right. Too late Yamame realised he was shaking it _free of some dark thought,_ which had someway snuck entirely past her notice. Still, before she may pursue what it might have been, the human was speaking once more.

“Yamame?” he was asking, uncertainly. “Are we… done here, then?”

The spinstress mused over her options. There weren’t many, but some were more tempting than others. In the end, she chose to give him a vengeful smile. “Hmm. How about a test? Shall I let you go and see how you fare without me dangling off of you and scaring away other predators?”

The human’s arm tightened around hers. “Please don’t.”

“Then that answers that, doesn’t it?” Yamame giggled again. “Shall we go home and have some real tea, then? That mushroom stuff is still clinging to my throat. Never mind the pipe smoke. I need to wash it down. Well, Paran?”

“Very good,” he said, relieved.

“Yes,” she agreed. “Very good indeed.”

_I didn’t want to let go anyway,_ she added inside.

* * *

All told, the rest of the evening had flown by uneventful. A night was now falling – or so much the clock asserted. The underground’s absence of the Sun as ever kept its claims hard to debate.

A pleased Yamame folded the last of yesterday’s dresses, laying it atop one segregated pile. Three such piles were now occupying the space on the sewing desk of her bedroom; in each, pieces of loosely the same make were stacked by complexity and difficulty of the threading. A cup stood to one side – half-emptied and lukewarm already. Yamame capped it off in one go.

Her human – never one _not_ to take her whimsies literally – had deposited himself in the kitchen almost as soon as their arriving; and had the spinstress not recalled of the dresses her drunken self had insisted on sowing about the house, she might have watched him quietly busy at the stove. Not so then; though the human had volunteered to help once the tea was brewing.

“I never tried to stop you either,” he had argued. “This is my mess, too.”

And however soon Yamame had laughed off the clumsy argument, the other implication tucked away in its folds had kept her thoughts slipping away as she’d gathered up the scattered pieces. Only once she had been locked with those in her bedroom (and the tea the human had brought in at some point), did the spinstress’s mind dedicate wholly to a familiar task.

The task which was now done.

Yamame crossed her arms above her head and stretched her back. That the tea had cooled off so dramatically meant she’d been a while; and in the dim lighting of her throws-and-wraps-littered bedroom, the spinstress began to wonder what was being done without the door exiting her innermost sanctum. Not much, if the sounds were telling (or the lack thereof); still Yamame found herself unable to resist the curiosity. So she rose from the sewing table with a pat-down of her clothes. So she tiptoed out the bedroom with the keenness of a spider on the prowl.

So she found her human in her home’s salon: seated on the sofa, nose stuck inside a book.

The previous few of Yamame’s payments had contained books; once acquainted with the rudiments of surface-world architecture, the spinstress had requested literature to be included in her reimbursements, the better to learn the finer points of her new pastime. Some books so-acquired had proven quite enlightening; some – and one of these Yamame now spied in her human’s hands – had been… less so. This book, the spinstress recognised, had been as serviceable as a needle without an eye: a fictionalised detail on an architect so enamoured with her work, so bewitched by her own designs, the gods themselves had soon taken note. And so one chapter, after page upon page of boasting hyperbole, the vain architect was woken from her daydreams by a spirit who embodied the best and most beloved of her creations. The spirit, quite naturally, was possessed of the form of a mightily handsome man, and gifted an undying devotion to its maker.

Yamame had skipped right to the end at that point, to find the setting wracked by plague and other natural disasters, as well as the narrator’s moralising conclusion. _Where did that come from?_ the spinstress had been left wondering. An attempt at returning to the previous chapters, however, only reinforced she did not want to know so much.

This was the book Yamame’s human was reading now. So engrossed was he, in fact, Yamame may sit right beside him with never a notice – which she now quietly did. Another page went by with her looking on, undetected. Then another one. And another…

Yamame counted the fourth when her human had at last sensed her presence.

A lurch, and he lowered the tome down to his lap. A second, and he was twisted her way – at once abashed and collected enough to apologise for it immediately.

“Sorry,” he said. “I got… distracted. Was there something you wanted?”

Yamame said nothing. Only stared on.

A sigh whistled out between the human’s teeth. “… There _was_ something, wasn’t there?”

There definitely was – more than one. Still, for the indivisible attention of her human, Yamame had to do with only one.

( ) Theorise on tomorrow.  
( ) Touch upon touching (bis).  
( ) Stare on stubbornly.


	8. Younger generation

(X) Theorise on tomorrow.

There were days in a spider’s life when a single catch was an affluence.

“Talk.” The spinstress, issuing her wish, folded her legs on the sofa. “Can you do that now? That little novelette you have there had a _great_ deal of words in it. Almost too great, if you ask me. Anyway enough to refill your stocks and then some. Well then?”

The man _humph_ ed good-humouredly at the teasing. “Generally,” he returned, “you can be relied on to speak enough for us both.” He dog-eared a page. Then he shut the book, resting it on his lap. “What did you want to talk about?”

But Yamame was narrowing her eyes; and it was with their golden scrutiny the human had to contend instead. That, and the pouting which followed.

“I don’t talk _that_ much!” huffed Yamame. “It’s _your_ input that’s off the norm – down in the abyss, in fact! Can it really be helped if I have to try and bridge the conversation by myself? I'm not the one at fault here."

“You never were, Yamame.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“What it is,” explained the human, “is that you talk _enough_. Not too much, not too little – enough. So please, don’t talk less.” He smiled. “… Or more.”

The spinstress had honestly mounted an effort not to release it; but, in the end, a grin spread out onto her lips regardless. “You snake! You were planning that from the start, weren’t you?” When the human shrugged the accusation away, she laughed. “And I’m supposed to believe that?”

“… I’d never been very humorous before I met you,” he replied. “I’m still learning the ropes. Threads? Whatever humour’s held on.”

“A thread’s a subtler type of link – too subtle for your quips, really. A rope is thicker and less couth – better fit to thresh my head with. Go for rope.”

“OK. I’ll go for rope.”

Yamame, snickering, swiped at her human’s shoulder. “Snake!” she chuckled. “But enough of that! Talk. I wanted to talk. Can you talk? Or have we consumed your stores already with that run just now? Hmm?”

Her human rolled his eyes up, as though to count the words remaining inside his head. Then, without expending any, he looked on back to Yamame.

The spinstress gave a nod. “Very good, then,” she said. “I’ll start. There’s something I wanted to theorise on a bit. Yes, yes – I know. This is nothing much out of the rule for you, and so on and so forth; still, it is a bit out for me, and I wanted to do some planning in advance. So, Paran. Tell me. What would you like to do tomorrow?”

“… Ah.”

This was the human’s exhaustive reply.

Yamame watched, with no small exhaustion of her own, as the expression on her human’s face died. Then rotted. Then, agonisingly, shrunk into a grimace so telling, instantly Yamame was convinced she wasn’t going to enjoy the answer.

“… You aren’t going to like this,” groaned the human.

 _How-ever did you figure?_ thought Yamame; but drawing on the positive events of the day, she allowed him to explain himself.

When he didn’t, she _urged him_ to with a pointed stare.

“… Well,” he began, “truth is… I was going to leave – for the village… in the morning. To look for our next assignment. A holy-day is oncoming, and the people are going to rest. A greater chance of finding work awaits when the tongues are looser, but we must make it before—”

 _Oh no._ No. Yamame ground her teeth. This was not happening. Not this time. _Not after today._

The human could but throw up his arms in defence when the spinstress lunged; could but _stare,_ wide-eyed, when she gripped the same arms by the wrists and prised them apart. A flash of surprise momentarily blunted Yamame’s anger when she found she had to draw on the strength beyond her two-legged form’s to actually _do so_ ; but it was washed away and drowned ever so soon. The earth spider drove on, until the human was pinned against the far armrest of the couch – and she was on him.

A misfiring instinct pushed to bare her fangs – but even it was swept away by the wounded female’s pride.

“You _aren’t going,_ ” she told him simply.

“Yamame, please,” the human pleaded. “Take heed—”

“ _Heed!_ ” she hissed. “Heed this! Heed what I said about _a day or two_ off. Heed that I specially included the ‘two.’ Those were _for you,_ you know! That’s how you take my promises? That’s how you treat my apologies after we’ve… after _I_ ’ve supported you?”

“Yamame,” her human was reasoning, “I don’t know what you’re—”

“I _hurt_ you, you idiot!” Yamame exploded. “I hurt you! Yesterday, I asked about your… your twice-cursed god, for no reason but witless curiosity. I went and did that! And then, when I saw you were hurt, I tried – and I promise you I tried – to make it up to you someway. Go, me! Go, stupid earth spider! Now watch as your efforts are all… thrown away.” The spinstress squeezed her eyes shut. “This is your limit, apparently. Go, me. Go, stupid earth spider. Watch it all go to hell.”

A pause slid by that neither of them willed to speak. The only speaker remained the blood pumping up the human’s arms – palpable through his skin, pushing against Yamame’s own – slowing by degrees after the earth spider’s attack. Tick-tock. Tick, tock. Tick… tock. Soon, and it was almost settled. Soon, and resistance on Yamame’s hold had loosened. Soon, and the human was breathing in.

Soon, and he added his voice to the message.

“Yamame,” he said. The voice was calm, but firm. “I’m _not_ hurt.”

Yamame shook her head. “You say that—”

“No.” A rare interruption from the human wrenched her eyes open. “I’m not hurt,” he was saying, staring up at her, “and I’m not hurting even now. This has nothing to do with my… god. And I told you so; Paranseberi is a mask – a mask I immensely dislike. That’s all.”

“Then why were you upset?” Yamame couldn’t help demanding.

Paran – the human, not the god – made a sigh. “The priest,” he grunted, “and his wife – and the servants – they were very… critical of you. Not your building,” he added, “there had been only inconsequential complaints there – not even about the beams – but of you. Yamame Kurodani. The earth spider. Mother of plagues, they call you. The yearly malady. The monster. The horror. The abomination.”

Some of these titles were well-known to Yamame – and insulting.

Some of them were new – and wounding. Yamame’s lips twitched.

The human would punch these thorns further. “There are a few words used for you in the village which are even viler,” he said. “And those words are why Paranseberi exists in the first place. To explain why this ‘abomination’ called Yamame deigns to labour for those who so revile her. To excuse how I am able to parley with her and her ilk without my insides coming up in wet slurry. To soothe the irrational mind that its new home isn’t somehow loaded with disease. It’s all… so needless. Needless, redundant, and degrading. And above all, stupid. So stupid, it puts _my whole life_ into question.”

There was more to this story than had been told – something the human was hinting at, but never revealing; but Yamame was too focused for once on listening to investigate.

“And that,” her human finished with a sardonic smile, “is why I was upset, Yamame. Not with you. Nor with your curiosity – but because you deserve better. Because you are more than a bundle of diseases, carried on an octuplet of hairy legs, which happens to be good at fitting planks on the side.”

“Am I?” Yamame asked. “Do you really think so? Really?”

“Much, _much_ more,” the human assured. “And it is because of that I need to go. Tomorrow, Yamame.”

And this time, it was the spinstress who found herself giving in. “So, it comes back to that in the end,” she sighed. “What did you know, Paran – you _can_ talk. Almost too well, where some topics are concerned.” _Such as me. Why is that, I wonder?_ Yamame looked down at her pinioned human. Then her bangs were whipped left and right as she shook her head. “At any rate, you’re a sinuous beast, and no mistake. There’s no holding you back, is there? Not even like this. You’re fully aware I don’t _want_ to hurt you, and are using it to achieve your ends. _He Who Outwits Spiders_ – that’s what your title should be. Why did I ever take you in? And you were saying I wasn’t dumb.”

“You’re not,” Paran replied instantly. Then he recalled the original subject of the talk. “You don’t want another job, then? I shouldn’t look?”

“I do!” moaned the spinstress. “I do. I do want another job – really. I want to… I want to build even more new, even more exciting things. I really, really want to. That’s what I wake for every morning.”

“Then what is the problem?” asked Paran.

 _I don’t_ know _what the problem is,_ replied Yamame, in a sullen corner of her mind.

Maybe owing to the rituals recently held between them (or perhaps another powerful magick), but leaving her human – or being left by him – seemed now to Yamame last in the formal procession of things. Yet this was the only clear point; and though she looked inside every turn and avenue, the rest were cleverly hidden from her sight. An ambush on the prey’s home ground may be the spider’s way… but what if the ground was _inside her own heart?_

Yamame Kurodani did not know. And in the end, the yearly malady (so-called) determined to hunt another day.

Her human, or He Who Outwits Spiders (so-should-be-called), was a picture of relief when Yamame drew at last back and set his arms free. Too late she realised the arms had quit resisting altogether at the end; only now, retreating to her section of the sofa, Yamame swallowed the belated question. A question the human, if he was himself, was unlikely to grace an answer on anyway.

The same human was now limply pushing himself up to a sit by help of the same armrest which he had been pinned to moments before. There was a joke to be made of it all, of some kind. Yamame didn’t make one.

Another question, instead, let loose from her silly mouth.

“Can’t I bribe you to stay somehow?”

Paran looked to her – startled at first, then hopelessly amused. “… You wouldn’t know how to do that, Yamame.”

“… No need to rub it in,” she muttered back.

“I wasn’t. I was…” The human trailed off. Then, something at last associating in his head, he furrowed his brows. “Yamame. I’m not running away _from you._ ”

She gave him no benefit of an easy escape anyway. “Aren’t you?”

“No.”

“No?” Yamame forced a wan smile. “What about my infinitely troubling curiosity then?”

Paran coughed. “… Maybe a little,” he confessed, “but we _are_ racing a holy-day, and no lie. I _want_ you to continue working, Yamame. And I promise: I’ll be a couple days at the worst. Then, when I’ve returned, I’ll make it up to you. Anything you’d like.”

“Anything?” asked Yamame.

“Anything… safe,” conditioned her human. “I’ll try to bring you back something nice, too. There was some of our money bundled in with the rest of the payment. May as well swap it for something more useful.”

“And you promise me this?”

The human, in a windfall moment of trust, offered a hand to be shaken – the human way.

“I swear on the gods,” he promised.

 _But which ones?_ wondered Yamame, taking the hand. Then she shook.

* * *

That night, Yamame had excused herself to sleep earlier.

After they had forged their agreement (was it, really?) on the human’s departure, no other topic had stuck; before long her human had reopened the stupid architect novelette and continued his reading. Yamame had, for a time, pestered him with this or another entertaining titbit; but Paran’s mind had already been cast to the future, to the coming on day. So the spinstress had been left with no choice. None, but to gracefully throw her towel in.

Now she had woken. Now she had woken and – having quit her bedroom – found the enterprising human up already. Without bothering to change out of her sleeping clothes, the spinstress watched on quietly from the side-lines, as the human readied to travel back to his birth place.

The place which, while it had birthed Paran, also bred the very prejudice which had brought him to Yamame’s domain.

At the doorstep of her tiny house, some minutes later, Yamame and her human exchanged their interim farewells.

Or they would have – had a word been passed between the two. Instead, Yamame swung the sash the human used to protect his eyes on the surface behind his neck, then pulled him down by the ends. Without speaking, she looped her arms around his shoulders and squeezed.

And, in another godsend display of trust, the human squeezed back.

About to say something, but timidly retracting it – that is what he looked like once Yamame had released him. A smart comment of this or that fashion, Yamame was sure; but none were issued, even when she stole again his blindfold and, same as two days before, put on it her pretended blessings. The human, surprising her, put his own into the mix.

Then he left.

Yamame returned inside her house, the sweat on her arms already chilled by the cold tunnel air. _A few days,_ the human had said. A fraction of what Yamame had lived; less than some of his previous business treks to the village. The spinstress slumped against the door. A few paltry days was all she had to wait. A blink on eternity’s scale.

 _So then,_ she asked the oddly vacant interior of her home, _why does it feel like the longest time all of a sudden?_

* * *

An untold amount of hours later, she formed a possible answer. An eternity could blink for _a very long time._

An impossibly bored earth spider was stretched out atop the sofa’s backrest. A pair of feet was wagging, back and forth in the air, naked and un-spider-like, even as their owner – also un-spidery – thumbed her way around a book whose contents couldn’t hold the attention of someone twice as bored as she. How under the earth it had held the human’s remained a stubborn mystery. Not one Yamame was set on solving; but in this stage of boredom the feeblest distraction went a ways.

The arms of her bedroom’s clock must have swung five hundred circles by the time she’d quit attempting to remember what she had last done her human had been gone. Nothing had recalled but the vaguest of ideas. A memory of sewing had come up; something about drinking had briefly suggested itself – but neither approaching the realm of clarity. The borders of this one began at the human’s return, then the architect’s work afterward. Anything before that time… was cocooned in a blur.

As now was quickly (or slowly) becoming. Though Yamame had given some consideration to leaving the house, a hint of a duty had stored the notion away – at least, until another day. To what this duty had pertained, or what its demands had been (else than remaining indoors) – this Yamame couldn’t say. _Something silly,_ she had guessed. _Like faith. Or hope._

Yet even in these overlong hours, not everything was dull and hopeless. For then a thump on the house’s door ruptured the still air like the shell of a bird-egg.

Absorbed as she had been in the unabsorbing book, Yamame rolled off the tall edge of the backrest and crashed bodily on the floor. The thumper beyond the door thumped again, dedicated to their temporary station. And even if it was an aptly startled Yamame who picked herself up and went to dismiss them, what they would be met with instead would be one halfway between an annoyed and a relieved one.

And so they were. Though it was no prematurely returned human who stood framed in the doorway when it was opened.

Who did, was a young, jet-haired woman. Known to Yamame and expected both – but still the Underworld’s great architect sagged dramatically at the sight of this woman-who-was-no-returning-human. The woman’s angular eyes betrayed no personal notice as they walked from the bottom edge of Yamame’s nightwear, all the way up to its flimsy shoulder-straps.

“Nice digs, Yams,” were the woman’s first words. “Whistle-whistle and all that,” were the next. And at last, “I’ve come to collect,” stamped the greeting ritual with a big, friendly smile.

Yamame Kurodani, the earth spider, mother of plagues, did not as a rule turn away visitors at her door. Nor was this a time of exceptions. So she shaped a like smile, and presented it to her disappointingly unhuman guest.

“Hello, sister,” she said. “A touch early, this time. Are the girls so impatient?”

The other earth spider – for this was indeed the visitor’s true colour – shrugged. “Aren’t they always? Altogether like a bunch of bleeding Oni. Granted, that’s _before_ work. They get even worse _after._ ”

Against the core of exasperation (why was one there?) telling her to slam the door and continue her sulking, Yamame giggled at the undisguised critique of her and the visitor’s unruly siblings. A distant relation it might have been, and such as Yamame had never traced back to any single origin, but a relation all the same by way of their shared nature. This alone made the scathing commentary – if not welcome – at the very least excusable.

“They’d have you tied to a pole and drunk naked if they heard,” warned Yamame, smiling. Then she stepped to the side of the door and gestured the other earth spider through. “Come on in, Ashi. We’ll find something shiny to appease them.”

Hachiashi, the _other_ spinstress, laughed. “They won’t if they love me. And why else would they have trusted me with their rewards? Come in I shall, though. Must have been rain upside. The caves are all drippy.”

And come in she did. Yamame shut the door behind her sharp-tongued sibling who, now she looked twice, was indeed as damp as a web on a spring morning. Hachiashi’s (two) legs carried her unerringly toward the storeroom, where the reapings of the earth spiders’ most late endeavour were safely treasured. With an overblown bow, the younger spinstress allowed the storeroom’s owner to enter on the point.

As Yamame began dividing her stores into those meant for herself and to reimburse her siblings, Hachiashi hovered by the entrance, leaning on the doorframe and watching her sister so busy. But, as any sharp object soon or late slips its packaging, so the younger earth spider soon unpacked another bolt of pointed words.

“So-o,” she asked in a conversational tone, “how goes the things with your human, then?”

Yamame seized up.

Then she un-seized up, and resumed tossing expensive items into a basket she had delegated to the job as though no asking had ever taken place. Hachiashi, whose carmine eyes were even sharper than her tongue, chuckled through her nose.

“That’s Yamame for ‘if I don’t move, the snake won’t see me,’” she interpreted. “Or it might have been ‘grout those bleeding tiles or I’ll give you bronchitis,’ if we were on-site. My coin’s on the former, though.” There was a sound as though arms untying and re-tying. Then, Hachiashi sighed. “Yamame, _we know._ There’s no shame in it; we’re getting our own jollies thanks to the fellow anyway, so we couldn’t give a care less. Only, I ask because I’m _concerned,_ see. About _him_ , not you – before you invariably point out our eight-eyed heritage.”

Yamame rounded at the younger earth spider with – what she essayed to make – a scolding frown. “Ashi,” she chided, “I’m fine— _he’s_ fine, thanks. I haven’t given him bronchitis or… or anything else.” She swallowed the lie. “As for how… ‘things’ are going, we’re _also_ fine – really, _really_ fine.”

“Want a free tip?”

“A what?”

“A tip,” said Hachiashi. “A piece of advice. You’re the eldest of us all, Yamame, and I wouldn’t presume to teach a spinstress how to sew a kerchief – but some of us wonder about your… shall we say, peculiar upbringing? _Some of us_ in fact worry it’s hampered your ability to interact with anything shorter than an outhouse and lacking for horns on their head. Such as, say… oh, I don’t know – a human?”

Yamame squinted. “What would you know about humans, Ashi?”

The younger spinstress didn’t answer at first. “… Yamame,” she said at length, “ _some of us_ didn’t follow your descent into the Underworld. Some of us chose to remain to lick our wounds beneath the stars, rather than stone. Some of us lived to see the humans arrive, grow, die, then grow again from the shadows. And some of us gathered the courage to come out and walk among them… eventually. Then, of course, the Underworld was cracked open again, and we were once more a big, happy family – even if some of us had in the meanwhile acquired other friends and mentors. My point, however, dearest sister, is that I’m offering a free tip. _Taking it_ would be what tact would dictate in this situation.”

Yamame Kurodani was starting to feel her age. “… Very good,” she surrendered. “Give, then. What do I do?”

The younger earth spider smiled a knowing smile. “Simplicity,” she said. “Touching. Humans love being touched. It’s how their species shows affection, see. Much of it also feels good to us, incidentally. Maybe we’ve got this form to thank for it. So there. Try touching. It’ll do wonders, you’ll see.”

Yamame Kurodani, already the eldest among the Underworld’s earth spiders before, now felt her age double again in her heart. “… I knew that already,” she murmured. “I knew that, Ashi. It… didn’t help – much.”

“Maybe you were touching the wrong places,” opined Hachiashi.

Yamame began to panic. “There are wrong places?!”

“There are _very_ wrong places,” confirmed the younger spinstress. “Now, now – quit fidgeting. Nothing is irreversible. If I had to put it in Yamame terms, it wouldn’t be much different from building. A window in a load-bearing wall may spell collapse for the whole thing; but put in some supports, and you’re back in the physics game. Similarly, when you apply plaster, you could slather it all over the target area any-old-how and offend every notion of propriety; but scrape it off and apply it again – slowly and evenly – and you can rub your cheeks with it without fear for ugly scars. Humans are delicate creatures, Yams. And, where showing affection is involved, human _males_ are the most delicate.”

“Where _do_ I touch, then?” asked Yamame.

Hachiashi lifted a barring finger. “Now, now, Yams,” she cooed, “you’re the eldest of us all, and I wouldn’t presume – and so on and so forth – but here’s _something_ that _someone_ told me a hundred years ago, in a darker, more pragmatic time: that there are only two ways to fill in the gaps in your education. With charms, or with bribery. And plenty though they are, your charms aren’t going to make the cut here. So the only option which remains is…”

Hachiashi left it hanging.

Yamame matched her younger – yet apparently worldlier – sister with an admonishing stare. To her growing despair, the stare was quickly losing out.

At last, the Underworld’s great architect managed to disconnect from her pride and store it away for this moment.

“What do you want?” she asked, eyes tightly shut.

Hachiashi considered her options. “… Fabrics,” she said finally. “Hardly ever do I see our payments include raw material, but I know you’ve a smart collection of scraps yourself, Yams. A couple of those, and I’ll share as well.”

Yamame shook her head. “I don’t have fabrics at the moment,” she said. “I’ve got… well, dresses. Complete ones. I was going to tear those down, but… well, as we know, I got… side-tracked, for a bit. A long… long bit.”

The younger spinstress made an amused sound. “You did at that, didn’t you? No matter. That’s even better. A dress, then. Maybe it’s time I baited a male of my own. And that’s _beside_ the regular pay, by the way,” she cautioned. “You aren’t skimping out on me, Yams. I love you, and I’d give six out of my eight legs for you, but a lesson isn’t a lesson unless it is hard-earned. That’s also what someone told me long ago. Well then?”

Yamame opened her eyes and pinned her sister with a hard, amber stare. “Ashi…”

“No dice, Yams,” Hachiashi waved it aside. “Your _prettiest_ dress – and my wisdom is yours. Take or leave, elder sister.”

( ) Learn from the younger generation.  
( ) Figure it out on private time.


	9. Morning return

(X) Learn from the younger generation.

“All right,” Yamame gave in. “Have it your way.”

Her younger sister’s head was cocked to the side at these words of submission. “That was fast and painless – for Yamame standards. Maybe I trivialised the situation. So things _aren’t_ fine at all, are they?”

The eldest earth spider mustered what little authority remained in her wrinkled heart. “Quit,” she growled. “Quit, Ashi. Things are fine – really fine. Only… Only I don’t know where to take them, you know? _How_ to take them. This – all of this – is just… new, to me. A year ago you could have told me we would one day be talking about how best to… to _treat_ a human, and I’d have laughed you to the other end of the capital. Now it feels the world’s turned belly-up, and that there _are_ humans after all who would seek my company precluding hostilities, rather than immediately throw pitchforks or run away. And did you know something, Ashi? That’s exactly why I’m confused. I’m just a dumb earth spider. A yearly malady. How am I supposed to know what to do?”

Hachiashi’s brows made an ironed V above her nose. “You aren’t dumb, Yamame,” she reproached; “don’t ever let anybody tell you otherwise. What you _are_ , is _single-threaded_. A routine affliction among geniuses, really. Nothing to self-deprecate about.”

“You’re mocking.”

“Under any other circumstance, Yamame. Under this one, I am glad you’re expanding your horizons. Who can say? Might be, you’ll turn out a genius at treating humans as well.”

Yamame spat a chuckle. “ _Now_ you’re mocking.”

The younger spinstress grinned. “Now I am.”

Somewhat less of a wrinkled heart, Yamame returned to allocating her sisters’ compensation. Hachiashi, at an uncharacteristic want of further lambasting, watched the basket fill with both more and less useful trappings from her elder sister’s stock. When it was full, she received the basket from Yamame, then filed out and followed the Underworld’s great architect to her bedroom, where their next goal lay.

On the sewing table, stacked in neat piles, a colourful arrangement of dresses was waiting. Waiting its ultimate end most of all – but now also for the salvation of a single of its constituents at the whim of a certain mercenary spider. The spider in question flumped on Yamame’s bed, permitting its owner the honours of presenting the candidates to be spared. The goods-filled basket cradled on her lap, Hachiashi looked on as Yamame unfolded the first of the condemned dresses.

“Not my cut,” she said critically.

Yamame shrugged. Then, she unfurled the next piece.

“Not my colour,” said Hachiashi.

Yamame put it away. Then, she pulled out the next one.

And so on and so forth.

As more and more chaos was made of Yamame’s previously assorted backlog, the younger spinstress purposed at last (by way, perhaps, of quickening the proceedings) to unlock the coffers of her worldly knowledge. Thus, once the next in the line of dresses had been damned to disassembly (too draughty for her liking), Hachiashi spoke in a serious tone – one which defied anyone to doubt her proclamations.

“OK,” she said, “lesson one, then. Hands. Humans may express themselves through their mouths first, but hands come close second. Hands are used in human greetings, ceremonies, intimacy and work. After their tongue, they’re a human’s foremost tool of trade. Are you listening, Yamame?”

“I am,” said Yamame. “Hands.”

“Yes. Hands. Have you tried touching your human’s hands, then? Oh, forget that one. That one’s going to hang on me like a stretched web.”

Yamame tossed the latest dress onto the rejected pile. “… I have,” she admitted. “Or, had him touch mine. With his own first, then… with his lips.”

The younger earth spider whistled. “Woo! Go Yams. Tracking the juiciest new trends for once, were we? Where did that one come from, anyway? Never mind,” she clipped the unneeded sidelight. “That’s high-level enough; I take it he enjoyed it, then?”

“I… don’t know,” said Yamame.

Hachiashi sketched a frown. “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“He was… I don’t know, reluctant? Kept asking if I’m calm and stuff. Then let go very soon.”

 _Not that I’m completely ignorant as to why,_ Yamame thought miserably. Too miserably, it turned out – or too loud; when she looked up, her sister was squelching her face as though a foul wind was blowing right in it.

“Hold up,” Hachiashi said. “Hold up and stay. You didn’t… do anything to him before that – right? Gods above, Yams. Tell me I’m right.”

 _And here it is,_ thought Yamame. A groan squeezed out from her throat. “I… may have bitten him. Once.”

“You _may have what?_ ”

Yamame palmed her face. “… I bit him,” she gave up. “OK? I bit him. That was _months ago_ , though. We were climbing up the outlets; he slipped, caught me. I got startled. Should have been the last, but it was the first instinct that caught. I nursed him back to health afterwards, though. He’s been absolutely fine since. Absolutely, really fine – really.”

“What… What did you give him?” Hachiashi asked, terrified. When Yamame named the illness, her face went white. “Gods above, Yamame, that _kills people._ ”

“It doesn’t _kill_ them,” Yamame moaned, “only—”

“Makes them wish they were dead instead. A marked improvement.” The younger spinstress was scowling up a storm and a half. “So, what you’re saying to me, you bit this human of yours – months ago – and he has been afraid of touching you since. Yes?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You implied that.” Hachiashi groaned. Then she rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Gods above, Yams. Gods above…”

 _That was months ago,_ Yamame thought despondently, _and I didn’t even bite down hard._

Her sister didn’t hear this thought for a change; stoutly convinced the entire event had been carefully orchestrated, she ejected the basket from her lap, and stood up from the messy bed. Then, she stuck one hand out at the gloomy Yamame.

“Very well. A hands-on lesson, then. Touch.”

Yamame looked from the offered hand to her sister’s glaring eyes. Then back again. “… What?”

“Touch my hand, you blundering idiot.”

What could she do? Yamame reached out.

A quartet of razor claws slashed the air where her arm might have been – had her spider reflexes not whipped it out of the way in time.

Yamame reeled back. “What—”

Hachiashi was flexing the fingers of her free hand. “Oh? Sorry, Yams. That just came out on its own. Stupid instincts. Come on. Shake.”

“… Ashi,” said Yamame, warily. “What are you doing?”

“Never mind.” Hachiashi smiled. “Touch my hand, Yams.”

“… All right.”

Again, Yamame reached out. And again, the air cried a shrill death cry as the same claws lashed out once more.

Now Yamame jumped back. “Ashi, what in the—”

“Oh? Huh.” The younger spider lazily examined her nails. “Ah. Sorry for that. I promise it won’t happen again. Touch.” This time, as she offered the hand again, the other one was visibly poised to strike. “Well, Yams? Come on. I promised, right?”

“Ashi,” rattled Yamame. “No.”

“Why not?”

“You’ll _swipe_ me.”

“Why! What makes you say that?”

“Your _claws_ are out,” pointed out Yamame. “You’ve just done it, and your claws are out.”

Hachiashi made a slow nod at this accurate an assessment. “Well now. So what you’re saying is you aren’t going to try again?”

“No,” answered Yamame. “No, I’m not.”

The younger spinstress smiled – and this time the smile was free of any and all derision. “And that,” she said, “is exactly how your human is feeling. Has been feeling – for months. Good job, Yams. You’ve figured it out – you bleeding genius, you.”

Yamame could but blink as her sister stepped in and clapped her on the back. No claws were involved in the action. Almost she didn’t notice when Hachiashi began for the bedroom’s door, shoving her along.

“Ashi?” Yamame gasped out. “What are you—”

“Tea,” said the other earth spider. “Tea and biscuits, Yams. This is going to be a longer talk than I’d thought. And I won’t be going easy on you. No, ma’am. Not at all. You’re in for an earful.”

“What about the dress? We were going to pick—”

“The gold one,” Hachiashi replied instantly. “The one you had set aside. What’s it made of? Scale? That one, want it.”

“… I was going to keep that one,” Yamame murmured.

When she turned around, her younger sister looked to all the world a picture of utter innocence. “That is why I want it, Yams. A lesson hard-earned and all that – remember?”

Then, the innocence cracked, and a devious smirk oozed out from the gaps.

“That,” said Hachiashi, “and gold makes you look terribly fat, dearest sister. Your hair’s gold enough. You can’t have all the glow to yourself. Allow the rest of us to be our own lights shining in the darkness.”

* * *

The following day, Yamame woke inside a dream.

It felt nothing beyond a handful of minutes since she had been lodged on the sofa with one of her brood sisters, taking in tea and thorny exposition in a decidedly unequal distribution; but the Yamame of now knew by some internal measure however late into the night she and Hachiashi had sat with their talk, it must have been a wealth of hours since all the same. Her eyes flickered open – gummed by sleep – and the vision underneath blurred.

A sluggish Yamame wobbled to a sit. A blanket – one she had no recollection of placing there – spilled from her shoulders and down the length of her back.

“Ashi?” mumbled the sleepy spinstress. “Sorry. I’ve dozed off for a bit. Where were we?”

A chuckle was her reply; but this was no voice of her younger sister who had drilled her with knowledge into the latest watches of the night. This voice was deeper – less feminine. Yamame’s instincts jostled her into attention. The spider eyes squinted at the figure seated beside her.

A face lazily swam into focus. A moment, and Yamame registered who it belonged to.

 _Yes,_ she thought dimly. _This really is a dream._ “You aren’t supposed to be here,” she told the face. “You were supposed to be _days._ Where’s Ashi?”

Another chuckle before an explanation was volunteered. “Gods watching,” said Paran – as though the simple evocation answered everything. Then, addressing the other question, he said, “Your sister has left. No more than an hour ago. With a rather sizeable stockpile of items; you would do well to retake your inventory to make sure… Wha— Yama—! Stop—!”

The human’s voice wheezed out with a sound like prey being throttled when Yamame crawled near and embraced him.

A mismanaged reflex – his, this time – saw him kick a clumsy retreat up the sofa. Yamame didn’t let go. She allowed herself to be dragged along. The reflex petered out; and almost as soon as it had flared, the human became still again. Yamame tightened her arms.

A silenced minute ticked by like so.

A minute; a little much to last for a greeting – but to Yamame not five, not ten, nor even twenty would have been satisfactory. Not like so. The spinstress breathed in.

“… Paran,” she whispered. “It’s fine to touch me. It’s very… very fine to touch me.”

The human grunted a strangled apology. Then, he nodded. The motion was felt by Yamame more than seen (mostly through his jaw brushing the hair by one of her ears), but there it was, however perceived. The spinstress hushed her alerting senses when two long arms wound around her – one behind her shoulders, one at her waist – and pulled her closer.

Now. Now another minute may tick by like so.

And a warm, warm minute did.

At its end, it was Yamame who rang its death-knell, releasing the air from her chest in a whispered question. “Did Ashi,” she asked, “did she… say anything to you, before she left? Anything at all?”

Paran’s answering rasp was a strange vibration all across her body. “No. She… She doesn’t like me. I think. Never said a word. Just… glowered.”

“… Very good,” breathed Yamame. It _was_ to the good; Hachiashi might have the overclever mouth of a Tengu, but the unswerving loyalty of the Oni she so vilified. A secret in Hachiashi’s keeping was a secret safe. “So, what about you? What wind has blown you back into my web so soon? Not that I’m complaining…”

Another funny sensation vibrated throughout Yamame when the human briefly laughed underneath her. “A fortunate wind,” he said. “Though, perhaps not altogether.”

“… Mrm,” Yamame murmured. “Well. Not even I can feature you’d come back to me so soon after blowing up about racing holy-days and so and such empty-handed. So? What’s the job? You _have_ got me one – right?”

“Yes. I have notes for you. As always.”

“Where?”

“… You’re lying on them.”

At no small expense to her heart’s economy, Yamame pushed away from her human. The arms on her back unlocked and fell away with an almost audible _rip_ of separating flesh.

 _Or was that just in my head?_ Yamame wondered inside. Still, never one to cast words on the wind, she pushed on until she sat astride him. A few leafs of fatigued line paper were indeed sticking out one of her human’s breast pockets. Never waiting for a “Help yourself,” Yamame burrowed through the pocket, scavenging the notes as well as what turned out a stray, oaken twig. Yamame flicked it beside the sofa to be picked up later. Then, she shuffled through the notes prepared on her new job.

The first page, it proved, was a letter of entreaty to the Underworld’s great architect – as overlong and overblown as befit the single complimentary of her titles. Almost, and Yamame would have crumpled it up without reading to the end; but then she marked the name calligraphed on the bottom of the page in bulbous, runic lettering.

“… Hijiri?” Yamame knitted her brows. “Byakuren… Hijiri?”

“A Buddhist priestess,” Paran supplied, “one who lives in a temple nearby the village. Much beloved; although her provision of service to _youkai_ as well as humans has raised some brows.”

“That temple,” muttered Yamame, “is _Myouren-ji_ its name?”

Paran blinked up at her, surprised. “Yes. How did you—”

The spinstress bit down on a lip. “I’ve had a sour experience with that one.”

“‘Sour?’”

“Never mind.” Yamame tossed the letter. The next pages were by half more interesting to an architect’s mind such as hers. “A guest-house, huh,” she was mumbling. “With rooms to lodge thirty… Conveniences as well… An outdoor bath? All fenced-off, too. Hmm.” Already her trained eye was righting the lines and angles of the crude drawings Hijiri (or one of her supplicants currying favour anyway) had scrawled on the paper to resemble the desired building. “This’ll be heaps and heaps of material,” Yamame judged the plans. “That bath – something fierce. Hope it’s not beyond the means of our ‘much beloved’ priestess to supply. Komeiji would never permit us to quarry for stone around the capital, either, if it’s meant to go to up the surface – and especially if it’s meant for a temple. That girl has a _problem_ with religious figures.”

“There’s a caveat, too.”

Yamame screwed up her mouth. “A cave-what, now?”

“A condition,” Paran explained. “The priestess Byakuren managed – over the three hours we spoke – to allege to me a need to… ‘display the utility’ of _youkai_ in enterprises like these. The priestess wishes you remain on the temple grounds for the duration of the works to be… _displayed_ to the villagers come to pray. Overnighting as well; though of course comforts will be provided. All in peaceable conditions, if you uphold them.” He smiled. “That was in the letter, by the way.”

“That’s all?” Yamame made a derisive sound. “That’s _nothing!_ All it means is we won’t have to make the trip every day. The girls will be glad to meet those curious about their work, too; bother, _I_ will be glad to meet one.”

Paran’s face darkened for an instant. Then, as soon as it had coalesced, the darkness was gone. “… Yamame,” he warned her, gently. “You’re very likely to be used as a political tool.”

This time Yamame was the laughing one. “A political tool? That’s ridiculous! What use would we be? The Underworld has only one ruler – uncontested and uncontestable – and she doesn’t do politics.”

“The priestess does.” Paran breathed out what turned out one heavy breath – the least because Yamame was weighing down on it. “Mark my words,” he sighed, “this project _will_ be moulded into a display of power for _Myouren-ji_. One way or another – it will. I respect Hijiri and her views… but she holds with the wrong company for a priestess.”

“This is how you came upon this job on such a short notice, you think?”

“No.” Paran wrenched his head left and right. “That was something else.”

“What was it? Sounds like a mighty fine coincidence otherwise.”

The human assumed a humourless smile. “A certain priest’s wife, vocal about her disappointment with her husband distributing her dresses as payment to… to _earth spiders,_ ” he concluded. An errant twitch quirked a corner of his mouth down. “Very vocal, in a place with many ears. Yet those more civil to your kin as well – as the gods had it.”

 _Those gods are luck and chance,_ thought Yamame. “Hijiri sought _you_ out, then?” she asked. “That’s quite the honour, I imagine.”

“No,” said Paran. “The priestess sought only _you_.”

Yamame had wondered whether the harsh lining of Paran’s words had hinted at something more than chance in his meeting with the Buddhist priestess; but, in one embarrassing moment, she knew differently.

“… Paran,” she said, hoping against hope her gratitude wasn’t hitching her voice up too high. “If you don’t want me to take this job, I won’t.”

The human’s eyes became as wide as the bottom of a tankard. “Yamame,” he began, “that’s not—”

“If you don’t want me to,” the spinstress rode him over, “then I won’t. I do want this job myself; it looks big, it looks fun, it looks like _a challenge_ – but if you don’t reckon I should, then I’ll decline. And did you know why? It’s because I trust you. So, if there’s anything putting you off of it, tell me now and I’ll burn the entire thing in the stove next time we put on the water. I really will. Well then?”

“Yamame, _that’s not it._ ”

“What isn’t it?”

Paran tensed up, as though fighting to expel a poison which had been long intermixed with his blood. “… It’s just a misguided worry,” he said at last. “Take the job if you accept the conditions; I brought it back here for that purpose. I’ll… worry on my own time. You, Yamame, do as you please. That’s how I… how you are at your best.”

Yamame made a slow nod. “… I’ll take it.”

“Then take it, Yamame.”

“Then I take it.” The spinstress folded the papers in half. “And taken.”

The human produced his relief in a long, whistling breath. “Very good. How long until you have a project for our employer?”

“Give or take two days, and I’ll have a reply and a costs estimate ready. Once she approves those, I can start sketching in the earnest.” Yamame slid her eyes up and down the human she was using for a cushion – had been using so for the space of previous minutes. Unaccountably, the tired expression on his face put her in mind of teasing. “What about you?” she asked. “Are you going to head out again, find me another job to substitute this one, just in case your worries eat you alive?”

“For now,” grunted Paran, “I want to shower and rest. The priestess had lodged me overnight, but I had to leave… early.”

“Maybe you should,” giggled Yamame. “Maybe—”

“And you,” Paran put in, “should apply yourself to work. Two days begin now.”

“Well, yes.” Yamame tossed her hair behind her shoulder. “Of course; you don’t need to teach a spinstress how to sew a kerchief. I mean, _fuh!_ It’s my job now. I’m not that irresponsible, you know.”

( ) Apply Yamame to work.  
( ) Apply Yamame elsewhere.


	10. An evening dalliance

(X) Apply Yamame to work.

_Or am I?_ Yamame asked herself, even as the thought occurred her work would not run.

But this was a bad Yamame speaking: one who would offer up integrity to the vice of short-lasting pleasure. This Yamame would be disallowed from further propositions. If the one pining after the work which she loved were to get hers quicker too, so much the better. Nor did the great architect write the possibility of frolicking after job hours out of the rule. To call these “a time for work and a time for play” would be a slight to the entertainment Yamame drew from the former; but, at such an urgent need to keep the two apart, the centuries-tested adage had to do.

Or, she could tell to the politicking curates of the surface world where best they store their guest-houses, and commit the rest of the day to breaking down her human’s impediments.

_Shush, you,_ thought the architect Yamame, roping the bad Yamame and towing her off to be locked deep down in Yamame-cells. All of this the bone – bones, really, and meat, and a wealth of other things – of contention stuck beneath the physical Yamame had watched: seeing naught, but apprehending the results anyway.

All the more surprised he then, when the Underworld’s great builder swung her legs over him first, then over the edge of the sofa. Then, she flourished to a stand.

_Something_ unfastened from one of her hips and tumbled down when she did – scraping down along her thigh and lashing her senses to a hammering gallop.

Almost, and Yamame would have leapt all the way to the house’s rafters.

Almost, and she would have loosed such a squeak of panic it would have been more mouse-like than anything conceivably spider.

Almost, and she would have flinched away, rounded on her human, unsheathed her fangs, and given a terrible lie to everything of which she had, over the last arduous days, been desperately attempting to convince him.

Almost… but she did not.

A sibilant intake of breath, and Yamame’s blood grudgingly dedicated to its primary responsibility. So expelled, the agitation previously riding on the streams had no choice but to smother, dissipate, and wait another day to trip. Yamame breathed out, and the blood, too, quit pounding through her heart. Or did it? The reason may have changed, but Yamame’s heart was still very much a-pound.

So she rounded on her human.

So she loosed a sound – but of decision rather than panic.

So she… well, she didn’t leap for the rafters; but she rafted her hands up to land them on her hips – one of which was smouldering still.

If her favourite human had touched her unwittingly, and if he had never realised until the contact had been terminated, and had been about to launch into a life-saving prayer (or a life-saving apology – or both at once) when Yamame had turned – then the thunderstruck expression plastered over his face was communicating the full truth. _This,_ thought Yamame, a tiny spark of intelligence flickering on. _This is exactly what he “warned” me about._ This was, indeed, the very precise thing that had been unlocked, two days before, in the capital’s eastern lighthouse, when she and the human had first…

The bad Yamame was bludgeoning the architect one before the rusted grate of the deepest Yamame-cell with her bare fists, and the master, the overseeing Yamame was wrenched away from the rays of enlightenment so as to restore internal order.

Meanwhile the Yamame on the outside was carefully modelling a smile which _wouldn’t_ immediately collapse into a stupid grin the moment it was shaped.

It did anyway.

“Paran,” said Yamame, who must look equally commanding and idiotic. “One thing, if you’ll please.”

Her human choked out the prayers and apologies in the making to give her a reply that hadn’t escaped unscathed by the same process. “… Ye—Yes?”

“After you’ve showered,” the spinstress told him, “and before you dunk yourself on the sofa and fall asleep… kindly bring me some tea. Won’t you please? Also take out another box from the storeroom; Ashi and I pretty much ran the one in the kitchen dry last night. All right? Tea. Another box. Got it?”

“Tea. Another box.” The human nodded. “All right.”

“Very good. Thank you, Paran.”

_Thank you,_ she said again in the confines of her mind, as she skipped on naked toes for her bedroom’s door.

The mouth of the Yamame who _click_ ed the door shut behind herself was warped into a squiggly line. A hand of this Yamame wandered to her chest, where her heart was, and clutched the silky nightshirt draped across her sweat-drenched skin. The skin was hot and sticky underneath.

And it was then Yamame noticed she _was_ , in fact, yet inside her sleeping clothes. Two-days worn, un-showered and entangled in a fragrance likely to rival that of a summer day’s labour topside. Agreeable to her – a spider does not flinch from its own body, however loathsome it is made – but alerting to prey. _To prey and…_

The bad Yamame, afoul of being squeezed under heel by her superior, gave up her trashing and reluctantly assented the point.

There were instances when being _responsible_ was the next best thing after making oneself out to be a very foolish spider.

* * *

Wonder of wonders, focus – once come – had entrenched securely in Yamame’s mind.

Across the afternoon hours, until the evening time, the Underworld’s great architect had sat, hunched before her pulpit, weaving line athwart line, figure athwart figure, over vast sheets of lambskin parchment. A latticework of graphite trails, spacing out, angling back and intercepting again, had been masterfully traced onto the largest of these sheets: a magnified likeness of the building described in _Myouren-ji_ ’s notes. Around the primary draft, in deliberate rows (which nonetheless made no sense but to the initiated), lesser drawings and computations had been neatly tessellated: floor plans by themselves, pages and pages of figures, listings of materials and estimations. And over all, an air of unbridled creativity.

At least, until presently.

The air was broken when Yamame spun her draughtsman’s pencil through her fingers, flicked it above her head, cracked her knuckles, then caught it again before it struck ground. The Underworld’s great architect raised her arms, leaned on the tall backrest of her chair, and cracked her spine as well. Then she pulled up her legs and did the same with her knees.

A satisfied – if a touch less structurally sound – Yamame slapped down her sketching tools and rode her chair away from the pulpit. The heap of dresses, which had been elbowed off of the pulpit when it had yet been her sewing table, picked at her attention momentarily; but Yamame, mind already elsewhere, nursed no further desire to handle clothes but those she had changed into (but not before quickly showering) after her human had gone to sleep away his traveller’s fatigue. The clothes could wait.

The subdued knocking on her bedroom’s door would not.

A mischievous spark yanked back Yamame’s shaping “Come in!” and turned the spinstress instead around in her chair, folding her arms on the backrest, then mounting her chin atop the so-made cushion. Smiling together with the mischief, Yamame held for the knocker’s next action.

The action came. What it was, was a slow inching open of the door.

A familiar face peeked into the room. Then its mouth twisted when Yamame and her smile came into its view.

“My, my,” twitted the spinstress. “Since when do you enter my bedroom so liberally?”

Paran’s face (whose else, after all?) rotated left and right. Then, the rest of Yamame’s favourite human pushed – very liberally – through the door, leaving it at a prim heel’s breadth ajar behind him. “Sorry,” he said, approaching, “I’d thought maybe you’d fallen asleep.”

Yamame giggled. “That _would_ trim the danger down a bit, hmm? Or were you planning on waking me up by mussing up my hair again, such as you did a few days ago? That might have bumped the danger right back up, you know.”

The human slipped past the flying sally with all the dexterity of someone who dodges sallies as a pastime. “I also brought you tea three times while you were working,” he pointed.

“You did?” Now Yamame was surprised; but, at once when she traced where the human was pointing, she saw not one, not two, but four cups drained of their contents clustered beside her drafts. “Imagine that,” she murmured, amazed. “I didn’t even notice…”

“This is the project?”

Nor had she noticed that the human had finished the pass through her messy bedroom. Yamame rocked her chair around to see Paran touching a splayed hand to one of her sketches. An elder, less tamed part of her squirmed inside its shell at its heart’s child being touched so freely. Yamame of the recent days found she did not mind at all.

“This is the project, yes,” she confirmed, shuffling close on her chair. “At least the easier half of it; the outdoor part will require a little landscaping as well, and believe me when I say landscaping disagrees something awful with a mind that has been setting walls and floors at right angles for the last several hours. This part, here, is going to be specially troublesome. See? The notes failed to note how the guest-house will stand against the rest of the temple grounds – and we really, really wouldn’t want the baths portion in perfect sight of anyone wandered in through the front gates – right? An ideal case, we should dig it out somewhere behind the guest-house – someplace between it and the outer wall, ideally; but, on the other side of the net, having the house leeward from the baths would invite no small amount of lastingness and convenience problems. Mould from the steam, cold air blowing in on the guests, and so on and so forth.” Yamame sighed. “So you see, until I’m furnished with all those oh-so-esoteric minutiae – whenever that should happen – I’m going to have to make it so the plan for the guest-house here can be moved whichever way without it disarranging too badly with either the plan for the baths section, or in fact the remainder of the temple grounds. What I’d best do, I think, I will cover up those baths with that touch of landscaping I mentioned just to be safe – then scratch it as needed when or if it turns out redundant. This is still going to need to go in the costs, of course; and, lest we forget, I haven’t the faintest idea how well-minded Buddhists are to having their holy ground disturbed like so. Altogether, it’s a giant headache at this stage.

The architect craned her neck up to smile at her human. “A headache you don’t care about in the least, too – do you?”

The human, ever loyal to truthfulness wherever it accommodated him, truthfully shook his head.

Yamame laughed at the volume of truth for once pouring out of her human. “That’s fine,” she allowed. “I’d be a lying, lying spider if I said I’d expected anything otherwise. This is my hobby, not yours. All of that just now probably rang monstrously boring in your ears, hmm? _Monstrously_ boring.”

Paran shrugged. “As long as you’re having fun, Yamame.”

“I am,” said Yamame, grinning. “I am at that – like you wouldn’t believe.”

Her human returned the grin.

The grin melted away like sugar in hot tea, however, at Yamame’s next words.

“Paran,” she said. “That aside, I want to talk with you about something.”

The human called Paran advanced through a peculiar sequence of motions. At first, it appeared as though he would melt together with his expression into nothingness. Then this proved wrong: that those had been only his shoulders and chest collapsing, rather than general dissolution. At last, inflating again, the human Paran faced Yamame Kurodani as he ever faced a Yamame Kurodani who wished to talk with him about something: with a squared back and a faint, surrendering smile.

“Thought you might,” he grunted.

“Was that perhaps why you were relying on me to be asleep?” giggled Yamame. “Never mind. Sit down for me. My nape’s already stiff from hours of drawing; I don’t want a crick from looking up at you as well. Come on, Paran. Chop-chop.”

The human scanned about for a chair. None present but the one containing Yamame, he walked over and slumped instead onto her bed. The spinstress once more looped her arms on the backrest of her chair and narrowed her eyes at her human.

“Are we going to pretend this morning didn’t happen, then?” she asked.

Paran began to cough. Then he stopped beginning to cough, and mustered out a reply.

“… That might be for the best if—”

“I’m very,” Yamame cut in, “very, _very_ bad at pretending, you know.”

Her human hung his head. “… Yes,” he murmured. “That much was visible.”

Yamame swallowed down the patent criticism of her self-control. “Could it be helped?” she asked. “I was scared. At first, I’d thought maybe something had dropped from the ceiling. A… A burning coal or some such. I don’t know! It startled me. Then, when I panicked and span around, I saw you wearing this goggled look – like you’d seen a snake flee under your bed – and it all threaded. It was _just your hand._ Imagine how stupid I felt.”

“I _warned you_ about this, Yamame,” groaned Paran. “I told you why… _touching you_ was bad. No more than two days back.”

“I’d like a closer warning next time, that’s all.”

The human sagged. He pressed his eyes shut with the fingers of his hand. “… Why? Why does there _have_ to be a ‘next time?’”

“Because I want it,” said Yamame. _Because Ashi has told me you would too,_ she added in her thoughts. _Because, on some level of this form, I realise that much myself._ When the human met her with a questioning gaze, she smiled. “All in all, you have no one to blame for this but yourself, you know.”

Paran made a bitter chuckle. “Of course,” he said. Then, sensing another pocket of meaning beneath Yamame’s words, he asked, “How so?”

“Think about it, Paran,” said Yamame. “Think about _me._ What am I, if not a simple _youkai_? What am I, other than an earth spider? A yearly malady? What do you believe I used to do here, before you tumbled down into my world and offered to be my voice for your brothers and sisters? Was I building anything? Or was I drinking the months away together with the Oni? The Underworld was constructed _eons_ ago; my part in it has long, long run its course. There are very few opportunities in Old Hell for those more creatively involved than where to throw the next drink-up game or party, or where to plop the next slapdash housing because the last one’s walls have crumbled through. Oh, there were requests from the Kappa and the Tengu off and on, I grant you – but did you know something? Those haven’t known a single new thought in architecture since _centuries._ The Kappa see buildings as nothing beyond repositories for their bizarre machinery, and the Tengu… Well, let’s not talk about where in history those feathered relics are stuck.

“So, imagine an earth spider like me one day met with a human like you, who offers – no, insists on – an attempt at something new. Something exciting. Novel. Maybe a bit forbidden. What do you think I felt in that moment?”

Paran, the shared memory briefly overtaking his frustration, shaped a weak smile. “Apprehension? A lot of it, if I recall the frowning.”

Yamame giggled. “Well, yes,” she admitted; “I was hung-over and hadn’t had the best prior experience with humans either. Humans _hate_ us spiders – earth spiders most of all, an earth spider who commands diseases – especially. Or did you know that? What else could I be, tell me, if not a _tittle little_ doubtful?”

“… Right.”

“Well, but I took you on anyway,” Yamame continued. “Then the first project was rolled in. Then, I saw how all those new considerations challenged my stale habits, and thought: it might not be such a bad thing, you know. _Then_ , the project was done, and the rewards came in, and I thought: it definitely wasn’t such a bad thing after all. My associates – my sisters – as well. They were delighted. Ashi, too. She may make faces, but she doesn’t dislike you; she enjoys these projects – and the rewards – almost as much as I do. Almost, because – did you know? There’s one reward in all of it that they aren’t getting, and I’m not sharing.”

“Is it the food?” guessed the human.

“It’s _you,_ ” Yamame told him. “There’s the food, sure; but mostly, I’m talking about you.” She rose from her chair and began to walk. “My work is its own reward; I can’t deny that, even if I were inclined to. Then, there are the rare items, the sometimes fascinatingly weird fabrics, and the great food. And then…” Yamame stopped in front of her human. “… And then there’s you.”

The human locked her in a hard stare. “… You’re being greedy.”

Yamame smiled. “I’m being _very_ greedy. I can do that. I’m an _earth spider;_ I _have_ no gods dictating how to live my life.”

“Neither do I,” countered Paran, “yet I know when to _stop._ ”

“Strange,” said Yamame, “because to me, it seems like you have all of two gods. Fear and Cruelty are their names. Fear – because I bit you once, _months ago_ , and you relive it internally every time I come near you. Cruelty – because first you show to a dumb earth spider something she has never experienced before, then you deny to her any and all further taste. Your Paranseberi has some tough, _tough_ competition. The poor thing.”

“My Paranseberi _doesn’t exist,_ ” corrected Paran. Then his gaze dropped, landing somewhere between Yamame’s hips and her abdomen. “… What do you want, then?” he asked the two (or neither), resignation weighing down the syllables. “Name it, and let’s be done.”

_Trust me,_ thought Yamame. _Trust me, don’t fear me, don’t be cruel to me._

And yet an answer this straight would at best ricochet back in her face from her human’s thick skull; Yamame folded it back up and chose a spider’s approach to the question. A moment of feigned considering, and a careful answer produced from her lips.

“How about this, then?” she proposed. “We play a game – a very simple one. A game of orders. I will give you an order first; then, no matter what, you will do what I ordered you to do. Then we switch. You will tell me what to do, and I must do it. And whosoever at any stage should fail to give an order… they have to give their turn.”

“That sounds rigged,” opined Paran.

Yamame chuckled. “Of course it is. I’ve rigged it.”

“… What if one of us doesn’t comply?”

“Hmm,” Yamame hummed in a wonder. “All right. Say we do it like this: if it’s me who backs out on your order, then it’s your win, and the game is over. We go to our rooms – or you go to yours – and we take our good night’s sleep. If it’s you who refuses to cooperate, though…”

“Kitchen duty?”

“That one’s yours anyway.”

Her human sighed. “… More rigged by the minute.”

Yamame rewarded the joke (or had it been one?) with a soft chuckle. “Very good, Paran. An inconsequential penalty, then. If I win, and you back out on me, then I want… then I want you to… I want you to embrace me… every morning, and every evening… until you can do it without… without going into _paroxysms._ Yes. That’s what I… what I want, if you lose. That’s what I want.”

_That really is what I want,_ she said again inside, willing off the burning sensation on her cheeks.

The sensation didn’t go anywhere but further in. Yamame focused on not squeezing into the nearest hole in the floor instead.

“A—At any rate,” she resumed (somewise), “that much should be nothing to you: high priest of Cruelty and Fear. Hmm? A trifle at best – right?…” There was no reply, and Yamame’s face went even hotter. “Um, Paran?… Hello?”

The human, his eyes still hooked around Yamame’s waist, twitched. “… All right,” he rasped at length. Or had he? Yamame could no more say for certain than she could fetter down the blood wildly beating in her ears. “All right,” Paran said again (or for the first time), “sure, that’s… fine. Inconsequential. Very. Who… Who goes first, again?”

“Me… right?” The spinstress blinked. “I said just then. I did, didn’t I?”

Paran nodded. “Then… go, Yamame.”

“All right,” said Yamame…

… Only to, in a terrifying moment of introspection, find the interior of her head vented empty of ideas.

( ) ???

* * *

(X) Ask for a massage.

Where _had_ those ideas gone? If the gods had an honour for earth spiders uncorrupted by amoral thought, Yamame would have won it.

But Yamame Kurodani had no gods, and her human was awaiting his sentence in invisible chains. So Yamame Kurodani cast her golden eyes away from the heavenly spheres. So the Underworld’s great architect turned her metaphysical gaze inward. So the mother of plagues addressed the one thing which had never once betrayed her in her life. So she asked her body what it wanted.

Yamame’s body wanted nothing more than to curl into a ball and scuttle into the shadows under the bed.

_That makes one time, then,_ Yamame counted inside. A clinch of desperation locking about her chest, the spinstress asked her body what the _second_ thing it wanted was, _after_ folding up and slotting into the nearest dark space available.

The body paused its tottering. Then, cautiously, it muttered something involving shoulders and a rub-down.

“W—Would you like to rub me down?”

The question (A request? An order?) tumbled out of Yamame’s mouth sooner than she may rethread it with cleverer words. It crashed so thickly on Paran’s lowered head, all but it broke the human’s neck upon impact. At least so it seemed; there was a sound as though a bunch of leaves crackling underfoot, then Paran’s head drooped even lower. The human slapped a hand across his eyes.

“… Yamame,” he croaked. “Are you asking, or are you ordering?”

_Would asking have done it?_ wondered Yamame; but out loud she volunteered, “Ordering. Of course, ordering. Wasn’t that obvious? Why would I—”

“Yamame,” Paran groaned. “I’ve never… _rubbed_ anyone down.”

“Well, I’ve… never _been_ rubbed down,” Yamame replied idiotically. After properly mauling herself for it inside her head, she went on to explicate. “I mean… Does it matter? This will be my first time as well, so…” More mauling. With a touch of needling beforehand this time. “M—My point is, it’s fine – really, really fine! Not as though I’ve got anything to hold it up to. So it’s fine if you… stumble. A bit. Maybe. An earth spider’s body is very… you know, very sensitive. Yes. You _do_ already know everything about that. I’ve told you all about it – right? So, just… be moderate. That’s all. Then I won’t… probably won’t even notice if anything… you know, goes wrong. That’s all I ask; I won’t even be able to tell difference if—”

Her human made a whimpering sound. “… Yamame.”

“Y—Yes?”

“Stop talking. Sit down.”

Yamame stopped talking.

Yamame sat down.

“No. Turn _that_ way.”

Yamame turned away.

A stretched instant and – the snub of being told to shut up, sit and turn eventually registering – the spinstress began to wrench back around to give the vent to her rousing pride. Then, the reality occurring she would stall her favourite human _this_ close to the goal, Yamame Kurodani abruptly quit exercising her ability to wrench, and settled down. An instant yet, and her pride did as well. By degrees.

The mattress underneath her legs was shifting. Someone took a seat at her back – at once too close, but not close enough. Yamame tensed up. The same someone behind her cleared their throat of two rusted syllables, which – by their sound – must have stuck there for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years.

“… Shoulders?”

_Two syllables._ Alarming how so little could make an earth spider tear right in two.

The half of Yamame which desired nothing less than to explode into a dozen embarrassed chunks wrung her fingers hard atop her lap. The half which stiffly concerned itself with preserving what dignity remained in Yamame Kurodani’s internal stores, un-wrung them at once, chiding acidly. Another, tiny scrap of Yamame – one unmarked until now, but who really, _really_ wanted to be touched already – screamed the pulling two halves down.

Tiny or otherwise, its voice was mighty indeed; and soon, the two Yamame-halves – deep down admitting to the very same desire – grudgingly stitched back into a kind of wholeness. It was a rumpled, ugly kind – and one which still wasn’t quite certain what to do with its hands – but a wholeness all the same.

“… Mhm.” The restored Yamame murmured a reply. “Shoulders. Yes. Shoulders should be fine. Should I… um, I don’t know… lie down for you? Maybe?”

“… No,” her human grunted at her undefended back. “It’s fine like this.”

“Undo my hair?”

“Please don’t undo your hair.”

“… My clothes?”

“ _Please_ don’t undo your clothes,” groaned Paran. “Sit and be still. Tell me if it hurts. And… Yamame?”

“Yes?”

A long, tortured moment strung out over Yamame and her human, all but snapping, before Paran’s answer was released.

“… For my sake,” he said, “try not to… make sounds.”

Yamame nodded, inside her head debating whether a first-time massage may be so bad as to make an earth spider make sounds.

Almost, and it would have – once a pair of human hands wrapped around Yamame’s aching shoulders. Almost – but the Underworld’s great architect was nothing if not a cunning spider; and she clapped her mouth shut with one of her own hands before the issuing squeak let fly.

The human’s fingers pressed down, as though probing how deep the layers of cloth went, and where the core of Yamame began. The core itself shuddered in pain when the fingers jabbed into the muscles between Yamame’s nape and shoulder-blades. Then, the pressure mercifully reversed… and so with it did the other sensation. Yamame shuddered all anew.

Paran’s fingers stopped moving.

“Was that bad?” he asked.

Yamame swallowed before answering. “A little… A little too hard,” she gasped between her own fingers. “It… hurt good, but it _hurt._ ”

Her human’s hands froze solid. “Why didn’t you _say?_ ”

“It _hurt good_ ,” Yamame repeated helplessly. “It hurt but it felt good. Isn’t… Isn’t that how it’s supposed to feel? Paran? That is the point, isn’t it? To beat the pain with another pain?”

“Yamame, I don’t know.”

“Though you know how to do it?”

In the time intervening Yamame’s question and his reply, the human squeezed her shoulders once again. To her dwindled credit, Yamame kept her voice firmly inside her chest.

At length, Paran gave a sigh. “Saw a friend, once,” he said. “Giving a massage to his… his _partner._ That’s how I know. Only saw, though. Never did it myself.”

_A friend._ The word lodged inside Yamame’s ears. _Then he does have friends there,_ she thought, with rather more lateness than surprise, _or did – but has never mentioned them to me._

Had he lost them once joining Yamame Kurodani in her bedevilled home? How were those humans who had known Paran, one of their number, minded to his binding to a _youkai_ of the Underworld? Though he spoke to the villagers still on those occasions his work so dictated; but Yamame, mother of plagues, the yearly malady, nursed no delusion his standing among his brothers and sisters had _not_ been at the very least affected – if not _afflicted_ – by their unlikely acquaintance. What else had he sacrificed to be here with her? What power was it which had propelled him to do so? These were mysteries Yamame’s human had secreted deep.

Nor was the spinstress about to crack her nails digging them up from their vaults; but another mystery was resurfacing – quite by itself – inside her head, and Yamame watched on as it rose from the earth of her mind, shrugging off the dirt and cobwebs. This mystery was shaped like _regret_. A selfish, mercenary regret: that she was perhaps not the only one dear to her human’s heart. That perhaps – and it was a sticky perhaps – she wasn’t even _the only female._

The thought stung. When she questioned it why, the inquiry proved near as thorny as the thought itself.

Another vicelike pinch on her shoulders blew the thought together with its tail out of her head. Yamame seized on its moment of confusion and crushed out the regret as well, even as it wondered at this new earth spider to which it had been reborn.

“That’s… better, there,” the spinstress helped along her favourite human’s continued efforts of… well, whatever it was he meant to accomplish, with the absolute innocence of massages and their finer points he had alleged. _To make me eat my words,_ Yamame guessed, _to have this end – in my loss. No such luck, Paran._ “Is it customary, then?” she asked when the pressure went again away. “In your Human Village – is it customary to rub down your, _nn…_ your partner?”

Whether he had heard the moaned interjection or not, the human Paran made the best show of not having done so.

“… I don’t know,” he admitted. “Maybe.”

Yamame swallowed. “What… Mm. What about _lovers?_ ”

… No answer came.

The human’s hands were maintaining their work and no mistake; but still no words were producing from their master’s lips. Not at once – nor afterwards the once, nor even by the end of the agonising minute. No reply at all. All the while her shoulders were kneaded and kneaded – like a lump of putty in a window-setter’s hands.

Again, Yamame forced down a hot globe of spit. “… Um,” she murmured, “Paran?”

This time, the answer was immediate. “What?” And level. Absolutely, _impeccably_ level – leveller than the floors of Yamame’s constructions. Almost, and the great architect would have spun around, to check if her favourite human had not been replaced with just such a thing; only then, shocking her even further, Paran went on. “No,” he said. “Never mind. Moreover: how long do I do this? I want my turn, Yamame. There are a few questions I want answered – truthfully.”

The spinstress, frantically throwing off the blanket of surprise, managed to fold it into a veneer of control. “Then… Then ask,” she told him dumbly. “Ask, and I’ll answer. No need to stop – right? We spiders may… communicate with your limbs at times, but not so in this form. Well, and you – you aren’t a spider, either. So there.” Yamame waved the rebuttals to her feeble argument away. “Talk with your mouth, work with your hands. Can you do that? It’s not grouting tiles, you know. Although, I guess it does seem terribly challenging to you at times. Talking, I mean. Well, but anyway… Mnn. Ask. And don’t stop – or it’s my win.”

The veneer, however thick-sewn, must have been a good impression; for then, Yamame’s human discreetly surrendered.

“… Very good,” he gave up, his fingers digging again into her stiff muscles. “My first question, then.”

“Mm. Go ahead,” Yamame allowed. “What is it?”

“Was it your sister who set you up to this?”

Yamame had to chuckle. _Here I thought I was the one being silly._ “Ashi didn’t ‘set me up’ to anything, Paran,” she said. “This is my doing. Mine, and only mine.” _Maybe inspired by some of the things she said, but that’s a technicality._ “Anyway, if you need somebody to put to blame – put me. Ashi is innocent – as innocent as Ashi can be, maybe – but not at fault in this instance. That’s all me. Me alone.”

Paran’s disbelief was so dense it had a sound. “Yamame…”

“She _didn’t_ ,” the eldest earth spider insisted. “And I’m not lying. If you don’t believe me, well, that’s your problem. Not mine – and definitely not Ashi’s. So leave her out of our—out of _this,_ ” Yamame corrected herself. “This – this is all you and me. Nobody else. Not here. Not now.”

Sensing a taut thread, her human prudently gave in. “Very good,” he said. “Second question, then.”

“Mhm. Shoot.”

“What gave you _this_ idea? This ‘rub-down’ business.”

“Not Ashi.”

“Not Ashi,” accepted the human. “So what?”

Yamame drew her back straight, then relaxed it again. “My… other sisters,” she explained. “See, they – sometimes after work – they rub each other down. Often… Mm. Often when alcohol comes into play. Ashi likes to say they are like the Oni in this respect. This – and any number of others.”

“Not your lighthouse Oni, though.”

Yamame laughed. “Niku? Oh please. No, he never… Nn, no. The Oni – they are an indelicate species. Couldn’t slot a door without ripping off the hinges. My best chance at a rub-down in the Underworld would be to bother the Komeiji. That girl, she welcomes all sorts of shaggy creatures – spiders likely to be included. Only, mm… Only bothering the Komeiji is bothering a snake – and this snake can snake through your mind as well as your web, you know. Snakes are bad – bad enough in the next burrow over. Never mind anywhere closer. No. Nobody wants to rub _me_ down, Paran. Maybe for the same reason they don’t want to fight me. Not my sisters, not Niku, not the other Oni.” Yamame chuckled humourlessly. “Nobody _whatsoever._ ”

“But me,” grunted Paran.

“But you,” confirmed Yamame. “So, see, you are my last… Mm. My last hope, Paran. My last chance. At a rub-down.” The spinstress giggled again. “Altogether very noble.”

“Heroic,” muttered her human. “My final question, Yamame.”

“Mm. Mhm? Give.”

“Do you realise what you are doing to me right now?”

A quick and cunning Yamame hinged open her mouth to reply.

A less cunning one – but fortunately quicker – popped it back shut before anything stupid might roll out. This was a subtle question. A question worth its weight in good nails. A question, indeed, worth a spider’s trenchant sight. Yamame Kurodani _was_ doing things. To her human or precluding him – many things were happening at Yamame’s behest. Yamame Kurodani was, for instance, sitting on her bed. Yamame Kurodani was having her shoulders rubbed for the first time in her life. Yamame Kurodani was enjoying it to some extent. Yamame Kurodani was breathing, blinking, and keeping her drool inside her mouth as the rule prescribed.

Most of all, however, Yamame Kurodani was certain she was missing the thrust of the question by a hammer’s swing.

“Yamame?” her human was demanding.

A new thing was added to the list. Yamame Kurodani was quietly beginning to panic.

( ) No.  
( ) Yes.

* * *

(X) Yes? No?

The moment was unrolling to the cut-off line, and Yamame had no answer.

A cold and clinical stock of viable replies was impossible. The panic might at any moment grab her by the shoulders (or was it already?) and startle her into blundering a stupid one; to rely on her spider’s instincts, too, would have been biting herself in the heel. As good build a web inside a doorway left ajar. Wrong-footed as she was, it seemed only one recourse remained for Yamame Kurodani.

Speak. Speak and hope the words fall in as well as bricks and mortar did when in her skilful hands.

“Yes,” lied Yamame. “Well… No,” she lied again. “Maybe? Maybe. I don’t know.”

Now her human’s hands stopped. “… This is your answer?”

Though not for long. Yamame squeaked like an old floorboard when they resumed exploring the pliability of her body. “ _Nn._ No. No, that’s not… That’s _not it._ See, I… I don’t know what I’m doing _to you_. That’s a no. What I do know is what I’m doing _with you._ What I _want_ to do with you. What I want you to… to do _to me._ ” The eldest earth spider squeezed out a powerless chuckle. “That’s the reverse, isn’t it? All I’m doing is spinning it over back on myself, aren’t I? I’m sorry. This may well be the first in my life I’ve actually wished I were in Komeiji’s pink little shoes. Then I could just read your mind, and – poof. All this stupid cultural differencey nonsense behind us. Wouldn’t that be lovely?”

“Nothing lovely would come of you reading my mind, Yamame,” said the human, dourly. “Trust me. _Nothing_ lovely.”

The spinstress smiled at the empty bedroom’s wall in front of her. “No worries. I’m not a mind-leech, you know. Ashi would tell you I can barely read a mood. She wouldn’t be making a big lie, either. At the very least, that means your dark and grungy secrets are still safe. As safe, anyway, as you continue to keep them.”

The human’s reply was as short as it was ominous. “… Yes.”

_Have I stepped on another toe?_ Yamame briefly wondered; but spider though she demonstrably was, she had no eyes on the back of her head all the same. The state of her human’s toes marched away into the unknowable.

A quieter pause – a gathering of courage, or lulling of aroused secrets – was visited on Yamame’s wrap-and-throw-littered bedroom. A mysteriously pleasant pause, interceded only by jab after jab of blunt pain – then pull after of pull of wonderful release – as Yamame’s human diligently kept on rubbing her shoulders. The ten or so rounds of the thin hand of the clock spent on the task had allowed him to find the earth spider’s sorest spots; almost every stroke now Yamame’s chest was pinching the air out through her throat in inelegant sounds. The spinstress bit down on a thumb. This did nothing to restrain her voice; but it satisfied Yamame’s need to try.

The pause strained to breaking point; soon, and Yamame spoke up once more. This time, she was a spider full of decision, not butterflies.

“Paran,” she said. “I think—mm… I think I’ve figured it out.”

“Have you?” Her human sounded one full of doubt.

Yamame nodded, very serious. “Yes. I mean, I don’t know what I’m doing to you _in a human sense_ – probably never will. After all, I’m just a dumb earth spider who—”

“You aren’t dumb.”

“—a _dumb, selfish_ earth spider,” Yamame insisted, “who only—nn… only ever thinks about herself. That is why – I think – my best chance to solve this query would be to look at it from my own point of view.”

Her human pressed down hard. “… Is that so?”

“So… So it is,” croaked Yamame. Then she said it again – normally. “So it is. Maybe I am stupid, and maybe I can’t read a mood. Maybe I’ve deserved to be locked in this situation; but I know at the very, very least what I’m doing to you, here – right now. I know that.”

Paran unloosed a very sceptical breath. “… Oh?”

“I know, Paran. I’m _making you touch me._ That’s plainer than… plain. I’m making you touch me. Toss this ‘game’ or whatever, toss winning or losing; all I’ve ever wanted was to be touched. And that’s what I’m forcing you to do; because if I had asked, all you would have done is brush me off, like a… a spider from a sleeve. An Oni with half its wits gone and half the night in his cups could have told you the same. Nothing would have happened. That’s why I’m making you. And did you know something? I’ve also figured out you’re holding back on me. The hints were all there; this morning only bound them together. Humans love their… physicality, right? You said so yourself; and even you said… even though I’m an earth spider, when we did it, you said embracing me felt… ‘OK,’ as well.”

“Very OK,” Paran corrected.

“Very OK,” Yamame agreed. “It felt… very OK to me, too.”

“So you said.”

“It also… felt very OK when we… you know – in the morning.” _After you’d quit kicking, anyway,_ the spinstress added inside; but for whatever crippled understanding she had of humans and their moods, she stored the thought away for now. “Very, very… very OK. Very. Then… Then – somehow, somewise – while I was busying myself deciphering those scrawls from _Myouren-ji_ , you… Well, you went and did what you did – to my hip.”

“… I did.”

“Without much contingency planning, too,” Yamame chuckled. “Given where I was at the time. That is to say – _right on top_ of you?”

“Maybe not,” Paran admitted calmly. “So?”

“So, Paran,” said Yamame, with a note of finality, “it’s very clear you want to touch me as well – but are _holding it back._ That’s why this ‘game.’ That’s why I’m _‘doing this to you’_ right now. That’s why I’m _‘making you touch me’_ – because you wouldn’t otherwise. As you said – I am a greedy, greedy spider.”

“Would anyone have sufficed?” the human questioned.

Yamame’s brows must have crashed above her nose. The procession of thoughts inside her head for certain did – all but ruching up into a flowery curtain inside her head.

Almost drowned out by the ensuing riot of complaints, an overdue thought caught up with its brethren, now they had been stalled. A stranded, unpunctual thought, which said only this: that the human’s hands had quit their ordained task (had long quit it) up on Yamame’s shoulders. That these hands had slid gently down Yamame’s arms (long ago now), and had landed at about their elbows. That they were even now _pulling_ her backward – almost imperceptibly, all but unnoticeably, ever-so-stealthily – but pulling on the dumb earth spider’s dumb earth spider arms.

Then, its urgent message delivered, the belated thought sprang away, evacuating through Yamame’s suddenly hot ears.

“W—Would what have anyone… w—what sufficed?” Yamame stuttered out.

Paran made an impatient noise. “Would anyone _have done?_ ” he rephrased. “Would you have _anyone_ touch you? Anyone with your trust?”

“Nobody _wants_ to touch me, Paran,” the spinstress reminded. “I told you just then, nobody—”

Her human cut her off. “Yes,” he hissed, “I know, Yamame. Suppose they did, though. Suppose one of your friends… Nikuyama – would you have him touch you, too?”

“Niku _has_ touched me,” Yamame pointed out. “Hugged me – which we have fought about, at that.”

“What if he touched you _elsewise?_ Shoulders? Hips? What if he said he wished to hug you – every morning and every evening, not only as a greeting? What if it were _him_ , not me, with you here now?”

Yamame’s ears were beginning to feel as red as the relevant Oni. “I… I don’t think we would be having this conversation then.”

“What if _you did?_ ” Paran stitched on. “What if you _were_ having this conversation?”

“Then…” Yamame hesitated. “Then I don’t think it would have felt _as good._ ”

This didn’t dissuade Paran’s burning curiosity. “What about your sisters?” he pushed on. “This… Ashi. What if she were here?”

“What does Ashi have to do with this?!”

“Answer the question, Yamame.”

Yamame whipped her golden locks left and right. Her ears were hurting. “Ashi… I don’t think Ashi would have felt good, either,” she peeped out. “She’s… smaller than I am. Thinner… bonier. _Tougher._ Ashi prefers to talk anyway – where I am concerned.”

Paran made a nod. At least so it felt like, from his hands rubbing up and down Yamame’s arms. “That’s what you want then,” he deduced. “Someone bigger than you to embrace you.”

Yamame raked her nails up her thighs. “ _Nn…_ Yes! Yes, I do!” she erupted. “That’s the heart of it, isn’t it? It doesn’t feel as good unless you’re… all _wrapped-up,_ right? Of course I want someone bigger, then!”

“And Nikuyama doesn’t work?”

“Niku is an Oni!” yelped Yamame. “An old, old Oni – with Oni habits and Oni manners! It’s different when he does it – completely, completely different. When Niku hugs me, he gives… he gives _Oni hugs,_ you know. The kind that spells respect. Camaraderie. That’s _not what I want._ ”

“What do you want, Yamame?”

“I want…” Yamame closed her hands into fists. “… I want _human hugs._ The warm kind. The kind that makes me… feel good inside.”

“Any human would have done, then?”

The spinstress reeled on the edge of exploding in a variety of upset fluids. “I don’t _know_ any other humans! Have you forgotten, already? I’ve never—”

“Imagine you did,” said Paran. “Imagine any other human, here, with you. Imagine _having them touch you._ ”

Yamame stamped down on the fuse about to spark off and make her into a wet stain on the wall… and imagined.

Not often – indeed, perhaps not ever – had the great architect of the Underworld to imagine such a thing; but the silly book on her vain sister-in-profession she had perused the morning of her human’s departure (not at all willingly) paid out a wealth of ready-made scenarios. Ashi’s talk from the same day, submitting its own share of ideas, rounded off the deal. The deal launched Yamame into a world of thought she had never toured before – nor had thought of touring. Her ears – if they had been pulsing before – were now hammering like a workman nailing down the tiles on the roof.

Yet even the sights offered by this unexplored world did nothing more than that – make her blood pound in her ears. Nor had Yamame conjectured any purpose to visiting it other than making her blush; until, on a buzz-fly whim, she exchanged whatever blank face had been filled in by her mind on these imaginary humans – for one she knew almost by heart.

_Something_ exploded.

Still it could not have been Yamame; for when the spinstress looked down, her body remained a single piece.

Something _had_ gone up in smoke, however; and as Yamame opened her mouth to… do whatever it is silly earth spiders do with their mouths, all she discovered came out was a billow of hot air wringing out of her chest. When her voice at last followed, it was a tiny thing. A tiny, embarrassed thing, no bigger than Yamame’s own tiny spider heart.

“… I don’t think,” said Yamame, “I don’t think it works… unless it’s you.”

There was an intake of breath behind her that could have meant _anything._ Then, Paran’s voice broke somehow through the noise inside her ears.

“Very good,” said Yamame’s favourite human. “That answers my question… Your turn, then.”

The spinstress _did_ want to turn, no mistake – yet found the hands locked about her sides (when had they moved there?) far from allowing her to do so. Not without drawing of her preternatural strength at least; but Yamame’s brain, refining on the implications of her facing her human now, blocked the instinct out. The instinct shrivelled up – as did Yamame – and died. The latter, fortunately, the spinstress didn’t follow. No.

What she did follow on were the words – the words she had meant to say all along, but forgotten inexplicably; the words which – had Yamame not absorbed herself in speculation on _potential_ rewards – she would have said at the beginning of tonight, not now.

Now, rather than commanding, the words came out as little more than an awkward plea.

“Trust me,” pleaded Yamame. “Trust me, Paran. Make it just for now, or just for today if you must; but for once… for once, I want you to _trust me._ ”

“Are you so certain, Yamame?” asked Paran.

“Certain,” replied Yamame, with a firm nod toward the opposite wall. “Certain. More than… More than many things.”

“It’s a—”

“A bad idea. Yes.”

“Very bad.”

“Very bad,” Yamame agreed. “So… Trust me. That’s my order, Paran. Take it. Or it’s my win… you know.”

“… All right.”

And sooner than Yamame’s fears may recall this order, or rephrase into something more innocuous, the human’s two human arms wound like snakes around the earth spider’s body. The first of the arms simply rounded around her waist. The other, more artful of the two, slithered up from her side – going across her chest, and landing its hand on Yamame’s shoulder.

When they pulled her back, Yamame squealed. Almost, and she would have grabbed sideways to steady herself by the bedsheets as well; but, for reasons earth spider wisdom had never presumed, Yamame grabbed instead at the arms. Her nails jabbed into the human’s skin.

“Paran! Stop, you’re—!”

_No, he’s not,_ another, less timorous part of Yamame was saying. _He isn’t hurting you. You are panicking. That’s what’s happening._

Another thing – no, several things, were additionally happening. Yamame was being reeled in. Yamame was being _pushed_ in – into something at once soft but tough, yet warm beyond expectation. The hair dangling loose by her neck was gently parted. The space freed up – roughly between her right ear and the geometrically appropriate shoulder – was being filled in by a nuzzling head. Yamame smelled sweat. Yamame smelled soap as well; mostly – Yamame smelled her fear steadily slinking away.

Then, her human spoke. The spinstress felt the words shape against the skin of her neck.

“This is what happens,” whispered Paran. “This is what happens… when I _trust you._ ”

_That’s all?_ Yamame wanted to tease.

No teasing came out.

Instead, the mother of plagues, builder of the Underworld, deadliest earth spider of all, Yamame Kurodani, curled her legs up – against her chest, and the arms enveloping her – and slipped herself deeper into whatever feeling it was dulling her age-honed instincts into uselessness. The feeling had a name. The name escaped Yamame – if not altogether, then at least right now.

Still she gave her best to find it.

“… Paran?” she murmured. “Are you there?”

“Mhm?” The answer was indistinct.

“Hear me out. All right?”

“Mhm.”

Yamame swallowed her rising nervousness. “I think,” she said, quietly, “… I think I like you.”

The human’s reply was a long and scalding breath crashing on her neck. The spinstress shivered.

“… You think so?”

“I… I think so,” said Yamame. “Not that I didn’t before; I’ve always more or less liked you. Only now… Now I think I really, _really_ like you – really.”

Her human almost touched his lips to her ear. “… Hmm.”

Another ripple of… _something_ shuddered down the length of her back. Yamame squeezed her eyes shut. “It’s… true,” she choked out. “Truly, truly true. I… I promise. Maybe I’m just a stupid, stupid earth spider, but… I know it when I like someone. And right now – and beyond right now – I am… I am absolutely sure I like you.”

“… Telling me that is dangerous, Yamame,” Paran cautioned.

“How so?”

The human did not reply at first. Only at length, spent breathing in her warmth, did he then venture the answer:

“… Turn around.”

“What?”

“Turn around,” whispered Paran, “and I will _show you_ how.”

And what Yamame Kurodani did – in spite of her spider’s instincts screaming at her not to…

… against her every experience featuring humans and their honeyed words…

… Yamame Kurodani, builder of the Underworld, mother of plagues, bearer of a dozen such meaningless titles – what she did…

... was she _listened._ And _began to turn around._

And in that precise, immaculate tipping point, the moment was violently shattered.

A _thump_ on the front door of the house – come in very clearly through the unclosed bedroom door – and the motion, the sensations, the anticipation, words, hope – everything… It was ripped apart.

Had Yamame Kurodani not been where – and in what arrangement – she now was, she could have punched her startled head through the house’s roof. A second thump tore across the silent air: less patient, more forceful, bearing even less wait than Yamame’s sister’s had the previous day. And that alone told volumes.

These volumes weren’t lost on Yamame’s human, who was soon again whispering in her ear.

“… Go,” he told her.

“Wh—What?”

“Go. Get the door.”

The spinstress moved her head (as far as she could) to left and right. “Nn… No. No, I don’t want to get the door.”

And another thump. The human behind her wasn’t budging.

“Get the door, Yamame,” he urged on voicelessly.

Yamame, quickly exasperating, twisted her lips. “Then let me go!” she challenged. “Let me go, and I’ll get the twice-damned door.”

“… No.”

“What?”

“No,” said her human. To accentuate how much “no” he meant, his arms coiled tighter around her. “No,” he said again. Then, having pivoted his own head to the sides, a final time, “No.”

Yamame squirmed. “Then how am I supposed to—?!”

Out of nowhere, the thumping on the front door shifted manner – into what could very well have been a battering ram about to do justice to its design. At the end threads of her own patience, Yamame began to stand up.

… Only to, having painfully mismatched her exasperation against the human’s power of “no,” tumble forward into the beddings.

And it was down there, in the mussed-up covers, pinned down, with the human stuck on top of her, that all at once Yamame Kurodani understood at last how far she had strained this one’s resolve. How far she had tested his human tolerance. How far she had _dared_ – for this was the correct term – the restraint of someone who – while perhaps not stronger, nor more durable than an earth spider such as she – had he but wanted, could easily, effortlessly persuade her to do things she _did not as much as know existed._

“Yamame.”

The sound of her own name whispered into one of her ears was a curse and a promise all in one. Most of all, it was suddenly _incredibly_ exciting.

“Ye—Yes?” breathed Yamame. “What is it?”

The human reached and slid a strap of her dress off of one of her shoulders.

“… You,” he warned, “ _had better_ get that door.”

( ) Door.  
( ) No.

* * *

(X) No.

The spell was a simple one. A human could use it – so then could an earth spider.

“No.”

The magic was unleashed; and as immediate as it, the human’s response as well came – in another heart-thrilling whisper.

“ _One of us,_ ” he said, “ _one of us at least_ is going to regret this.”

A more diffident piece of Yamame already was. _Are we about to do something so evil?_

But the only evil between them appeared Yamame’s current, lying, pose – one disallowing her human from further manipulating the bands of her clothing. The pose was not Yamame’s fault, of course; no – it was entirely on the human where the blame lay in this arrangement. All the same, the earth spider’s face – misaligning the guilt perhaps, or perhaps simply for no reason but unlimited foolishness – grew as hot as the grand magmatic pools flooding the Underworld’s lower deposits.

At having this found out (the fault, not Yamame’s dramatically rising colour), the human released another impatient sound; and on some yet-alert level of Yamame Kurodani, her mind amused its familiarity. Though, as a rule, these sounds had been reserved for Yamame’s more elaborate whims – not the inability to peel her out of her clothes. An immaterial difference, that – but one she felt would return to haunt her.

Something else, however, was returning first. The something was her human’s speaking voice.

“Brace,” it ordered.

_What kind?_ Yamame wanted to clarify.

This, however, switched into sudden irrelevance as the spinstress realised the kind of this brace made _no matter_ whatsoever. What _did_ matter was its purpose. What it was _for._ And what it was for, was to heave Yamame up again to a sit by the half-stripped shoulders.

Yamame Kurodani made no sound of startling.

This, in and of itself, was startling; for Yamame had _expected_ to make a sound at least – never mind to have to curb her instincts rising to answer. Yet, no instincts rose. No panicked reflex caught. The earth spider had found itself once more snared inside a human’s arms, but its innermost workings had found this state _no longer remarkable._

The _absence_ of reply from her most intimate threading chilled Yamame more than the most violent reaction ever could. The eldest, most dreaded of the Underworld’s spiders was Yamame Kurodani – but _was she still,_ without the entourage of hyper-acute senses to guide her? What poor excuse for a _youkai_ made she, with her (sometimes over-impressible) instincts patched over? What there remained, if her lifelong company had left her high and dry? What else could she trust?

A moment fraught with doubt… and timidly, an answer put itself forward.

What Yamame Kurodani could trust… _Whom_ she could trust – was her human. The one behind her. The one holding Yamame very, very close. The one who, using the arm _not_ occupied holding her very close, was gently rolling the outer layer of her dress down to her waist.

Yamame Kurodani was _being undressed._ Ordinary though it would be had she been doing it herself, in the passive it raised the hairs atop her head.

Almost, and – distracted by her rebelling hair – Yamame would not have registered the first of her undershirt’s buttons following in being undone. Then another one. And another. Three buttons had come loose; then, as tenderly as skinning a tomato, her human tugged the shirt halfway down her arms – fully revealing Yamame’s flushed shoulders.

And then, mirroring what he had done days before to the back of her hand, Yamame’s human touched his lips to her exposed skin.

Ashi had had the right. The conceited architectress of Yamame’s book as well; but neither between the two could have predicted how such a simple relocation of this lip-touching ritual to an earth spider’s shoulders may cause her heart to palpitate. Though perhaps not so simple; for this ritual now differed further from its predecessor. The human’s lips weren’t stuck now as they had been to her hand (for almost a full minute); now, these lips were parting from her skin, moving, then touching down again – as though stepping from thread to thread – and travelling, ever up: up to Yamame’s neck… then the back of her cheek… then, finally, the earth spider’s furiously blushing ear.

“… Yamame.”

_Again with the curses-but-promises,_ Yamame’s fogged mind lamented. “… What is it?”

The human had _only_ needed three hot breaths to decide. Then, he told her. “There’s… something you may… _like_ to know.”

“W—What is it?” Yamame choked out again.

Another pause, and the something was made known. “… I like you, as well.”

Though it had felt something _else_ had been meaning to be shaped by the human’s mouth; but these were the words that came out in the end.

Yamame didn’t complain.

Yamame didn’t offend.

Yamame didn’t ask after those other words which had by now slipped well beyond capture.

Yamame, in truth, did very little in the following moments – very, very little, but becoming the most reddest, tiny, shrunken, and mysteriously, mysteriously _satisfied_ spider there was under the earth.

At the end of these moments – these warm, warm moments – it was this spider who recalled the original command, or request: the one which had been made before the lip-touching, before the undressing; the order from _before_ the intrusion which had ultimately demonstrated to Yamame how far her human had been pushed.

That order had been to _turn around._

And so it was, that Yamame Kurodani – once again – began to turn around.

And it was then, in that unguarded moment, the _original_ Yamame the earth spider – smothered until now – returned in all measure and in full force.

* * *


	11. An interruption

Three.

Three things.

Three things occurred in the space it took one heartbeat to become the next.

The first: the front door of Yamame’s house was brutally rammed open.

The second: that registering this sound, the spinstress clapped a hand over the O of surprise ripping out on her human’s face.

Then, the third, final thing: the earth spider _wrenched_ her body sideways, dropping down the edge of the bed; then – cushioning the fall with her own back – she jammed herself into the narrow storage space beneath – unceremoniously dragging her human along.

The human was screaming. Not through the usual articulators – for these were effectively stoppered; but there was no mistaking the frenzied _thump, thump, thump_ of his heart stabbing out at Yamame’s roused senses. Had the underside of her bed been less ill-suited to contain anything beyond Yamame and her human squished together very tight, she might push her chin upward and appreciate the look of fear inside his eyes; now, however, with her head wedged firmly between the human’s shoulder and the boards of the bed, Yamame’s acid yellow eyes were focused singularly on the opened bedroom’s door.

Someone had entered the spider’s dwell.

A sprinkling of footfalls – and these were the symmetric footfalls of a bipedal – and the intruder, clearing the entryway, strode into the house’s salon. No mistaking so much, either; Yamame needn’t consult the preciseness of her arachnid form to estimate this bipedal at average height… perhaps a touch underweight… alert and confident… and, as the manner of their steps decidedly evinced – of the female sex. Most importantly (and most to the good), as the intruder – this female – began a sweep of the house from the rooms opposite of Yamame’s, it also turned out, however alert, mercifully un-alerted of the earth spider’s frantic concealment.

The earth spider’s – _and her human’s._

Yamame Kurodani’s needle-keen attention looped back to the man crammed with her under the bed.

Paran no longer screamed. Nor was his heart _approximating_ the screams he _would have_ no doubt been demonstrating had Yamame’s hand not been keeping his mouth pad-locked; but, among all the things her favourite human wasn’t doing, there was one he yet _was._ The thing was a _hiss_ after a _hiss_ of pained breath being pushed out through his nose and over Yamame’s palm. All too late the spinstress realised the fingers of her human’s better hand were trapped – crushed, really – between the bed’s hard wood underbelly and the base of her own spine.

Yamame Kurodani bucked, and the fingers were freed. Though they gripped her elsewhere just as soon; but, perhaps rather than screaming, clutching at the rolled up fabrics of her dress made for the stealthier killer of pain. Yamame could appreciate it. Yamame could _say_ she appreciated it while the intruder remained outside the earshot; still, when she opened her mouth to do just that, the reawakened spider’s instincts expelled another set of words. The words were between and betwixt silly and the silliest.

_“Are you scared?”_

These words.

Silly enough to make Yamame herself to squirm; not silly enough still to trigger a retort. The human, very seriously, began twisting his head left and right.

Then, the obvious truth catching up, he twisted it – once – up and down.

Yamame’s own heart… well, it didn’t scream. Had it, it would have been a very quiet scream; but it _yelped_ inside its cage, if nothing more. _“… No worries,”_ she whispered regardless at her human. _“No worries, Paran. Hold still. This’ll be over soon. Whoever it is out there, I’m not fighting them. Not with you underfoot. A thief wouldn’t have knocked for so long anyway; whoever they are, they are looking for me. Well, let them look then. Hold still. You’ll be fine. You’ll be fine…”_

Yamame breathed out the last promise, and the human shaped another nod – less wounding this time. And, held still as told…

… For the due time the intruder in his and Yamame’s home needed to at last remember – or perhaps notice – the door poorly securing the way into their hiding place. There were strides – bold and alert. There was an inching open (or wider, anyway) of the door. There were – surprising no spider – two prim cowhide booties sliding into view at the ends of unseen legs. There was an instant of hesitation…

… And then, perhaps the single odd piece in the wardrobe of events, there was a sigh of relief issued between alien lips. The intruder slid away from the dark mouth of Yamame’s bedroom; then, pausing once more in the salon, and finally deciding the house empty, hurriedly left. The front door slammed back close.

Yamame Kurodani let go of her human.

A reassuring “Gone,” and she was crawling into the open, leaving Paran to do the same at a hopeful absence of further damage to his sense of safety. Though his re-emergence was laboured; all the same, Yamame welcomed the opportunity to peek her dishevelled head without the bedroom’s door, in case – an unlikely case, but still – the trespasser’s leaving had been a ruse: an illusion meant to fool her spider’s hearing by way of treacherous magicks.

It had not been a ruse. The intruder – whoever she had been – was truly gone. As gone, maybe, as Yamame Kurodani’s dignity and visual order; but these interests sifted right through the spider’s mental net.

What did not, and caught, was the whine of settling wood behind her. The spinstress span around to find her human seated again on her bed: upper body hunched halfway to his knees, legs squeezed painfully together.

“Paran?” asked Yamame. “What’s wrong?”

“… Knocked my kneecaps.” The human’s reply was prickly at best. At worst, it was accusatory. “… Give me a moment.”

“… OK,” allowed Yamame. The sight of the man back atop her bed called forth distracting, hungry thoughts. The spinstress – with difficulty – folded them away. The fold was an easily undone sort… but it must do. “I’m… going to check for damages,” she said, rounding away from the quietly suffering man. “You… um, nurse your kneecaps in the meanwhile. All right?”

“… I will,” he assured her. “Go.”

“… OK.”

Yamame Kurodani, not looking back, quit her bedroom, on feet and knees that were oddly soft themselves for no understandable reason.

The rest of the house was undamaged (even the front door, which Yamame had mentally resigned to replace); but unchanged though its outward layers appeared, Yamame Kurodani’s spider acuity told of two new, stranger elements present within the walls. The first of these was a faint scent of small prey Yamame _knew_ she knew, but could not place. The second…

The second was a scrap of parchment left on her salon’s tea table. The scrap was glowing with hastily described words.

Yamame picked up the message. The first line had been inked on the paper in circular, glyph-like runes, which Yamame had never seen before, nor could read – then scrawled over. The next lines, though fully indited in _Gensokyo_ ’s primary, angular script, bore the wobbly signage of a hand unused to – or perhaps unwilling to use – the target language.

It was not that which threw all further thoughts of frolicking out of Yamame’s head. The words themselves did.

 _Earthe Spyder!_ the trespasser’s letter began. _Earthe Spyder! **We have found your kill**._

* * *

「 _Earthe Spyder! We have found your kill.  
~~Mas~~ ~~Good doct~~ Master Eirin has found cause: spyder bite & poison.  
Human Village quiet; HOWEVER we are informing your ~~Prin~~ Lady!  
Beware!  
— ~~House Eter~~ Inaba Udongein of House Eternal_」

Yamame rolled the words over and over inside her mind’s web. They weren’t wrapping.

Her human – who, in the meanwhile it had taken Yamame to discover and absorb the message, had smoothed out whatever damage had been done to his knees – had re-joined her; and, forehead crinkled like rayon not been ironed in months, it was now him running his human eyes over and across the same threatening lines. Mistrust was plainly written in those crinkles; and though it was yet another language Yamame – once more planted atop her sofa – had never had to read before, all the same she pulled her legs tighter against her chest.

Paran threw the message down on the table. The paper caught the air; and instead, the letter sailed in a fabulous spiral under the sofa.

Yamame Kurodani turned up a humourless smile. “Well?” she asked. “What’s your take?”

Her human, assuming a tragic face, shook his head left and right. Then, he grunted, “That isn’t what our village is called.”

The earth spider’s smile became a shade less sullen. “That is what you’re worried about?”

“Anything else I should be?”

Almost, and Yamame would have told him; only then, the joke finally cataloguing as what it had been (that is to say, a joke), the spinstress forced a tiny, little chuckle to gratify it. The human smiled a smile back. The smile was likewise forced.

“Since when are you knighted, then?” he asked.

Yamame blinked. “Knighted? What?”

“… Sorry. I’ll stop. The message,” he explained. “It mentioned a ‘Lady.’”

“Ah. That. Must have meant the Komeiji. Those snakes.” Yamame propped her chin on her folded knees. “Can’t feature it could be anyone else. Whatever the Oni fancy, the elder Komeiji _is_ our ruler – even if she isn’t much for the ruler-y part. Though I’ll wager you my nicest dress it matters very little to our brothers and sisters up above. All they want is someone to hold responsible. Which the Komeiji family is, at that.” The spinstress closed her eyes. “Whatever _I_ say, too. The eldest one would have my legs picked off if she heard me talk. Or think. Although, not to take it away from her, she has been softer on all of us since the recent trouble. Seldom as she deigns to leave the house, anyway.”

“Trouble?”

“A smattering of rumours,” Yamame brushed the question off, “all of which turned out truer than they had any right to be. At any rate, I suppose this means we should be ready for a Komeiji poking her nose about the place soon. Always too soon, if you ask me.” The spinstress sighed. “Another snake in the pile…”

“Yamame.”

“Sorry,” said Yamame. “You aren’t a snake, Paran. Of course not. You’re—”

“I know, Yamame. Here – look at me.”

 _Maybe a snake after all,_ thought the spinstress, pulling open her tired eyes, and giving their full attention to her human. Seating himself beside her, the human did just so as well. All at once, the accused earth spider found the same, serious gaze from days before clamping her in place. The same gaze, which – though attached to lesser matters previously – now again told Yamame to listen and learn.

And so she listened. So she learned.

“To begin with,” her favourite human said, quietly, “let us make clear on this: that I know very well that my… that _people_ have died, due to you, before. That, since the opening of the Underworld, humans like me have come down with – and perished to – sickness authored by one ‘yearly malady,’ Yamame Kurodani. That—” the corners of his lips quirked up in an awkward smile “—not very long ago, I myself very near met a similar fate.”

Yamame screwed up her mouth. “Let’s not talk about that.”

“As well we don’t,” agreed Paran, the smile melting away like warmth in the rain; “but I have known this, and no lie. I have _always_ known it.”

“That is a big word,” said Yamame. “Considering how short we’ve been acquainted.”

“Might be.” A glimmer of some more private amusement played in the human’s eyes as he conceded the point. Though, as soon he was all Paran again: straight as a needle, as serious as himself. “Still, there’s something else I know,” he resumed. “Something few have stumbled on – and fewer still shared the tale, if your reputation is telling. That ‘something’ is this: that Yamame Kurodani, the so-called ‘mother of plagues’ is a docile creature, who rarely attacks without she is threatened first. Or otherwise provoked. Or scared. Or extorting. Or—”

“What are you trying to say?”

The human Paran, exhaling, squared his back. “That Yamame Kurodani has done no wrong,” he declared. “You and I have been… together for days, now; and, discounting my short-lasting trip to the village – which I have on good authority you didn’t follow – I’ve not seen you hurt any human otherwise than myself. And I’m not dead. Nor even did our latest contractor appear any worse for wear last I saw him. At least, not any worse than his wife had cooked up for him for giving out her dresses.”

 _Who might this “good authority” be?_ wondered Yamame, recalling a certain assurance of never speaking with – or hearing a word from – her dear sister raised by her human no longer ago than that morning.

Then another possibility came slithering in, and it put a fire under Yamame’s heart. Had Ashi not spoken of “baiting a male” for her own, after all? And, if not Ashi, any of Yamame’s unruly sisters could have done what the message alleged had been done. _But would they?_ Sour again the slowly un-spoiling relations between themselves and their newest employers? Yamame Kurodani believed not… but Yamame Kurodani had believed many things throughout her long life, a healthy number of which had been shattered as recently as the previous half-hour. The doubts only grew.

Not so in Paran’s mind; for Yamame’s human was delivering his final argument soon. “So you’ll forgive me,” he said, his tone defying anyone to dispute him (including Yamame), “you’ll forgive me, but I’ll hold that Yamame Kurodani has done no wrong. I’ll hold it. Until this Komeiji-lady walks up here and confirms it herself. She _is_ going to confirm it, too. And did you know why? Because you haven’t done any wrong, Yamame. You never, _never_ have.”

Yamame _could_ dispute him.

Yamame could _certainly_ beat him in that dispute. Yamame could, in the very point of fact, call back on any of the instances she had wronged – him, or any other humans or inhumans likewise – across the long years of existence. Yamame could wrong him even now. What did he know? A whiff of black, earthen magick – and he would have been meeting with his Paranseberi quicker than either would have liked.

Yamame Kurodani did not _want_ to dispute him. There was, in the point of that same fact, very little Yamame Kurodani wanted right then – very little, elsewise than to throw her arms around her favourite, favourite human, and pull him in very close. To give release to the warm feeling spreading out from her tiny spider heart. Gratitude? It must have been; though never before had being _grateful_ caused Yamame’s face to blush so much.

Nor was there an overabundance of _throwing_ of arms in what happened next; but _sliding_ cut close enough, and Yamame – very calmly, as though it was the most natural thing to do so – reached out, and slid her arms around her human’s shoulders. This time, the human did not fight. This time, he did not flail up and down the sofa like a fish on a hook.

This time, what her favourite human did was – very calmly, as though it was the most natural thing to do so – he slid his arms behind her back, and pulled Yamame Kurodani in – very close.

A minute raced by.

A full minute. Though it had felt no longer than two breaths (which it might have been); then, out of whatever deep drawer had hid it, Yamame’s voice returned to its incredibly pleased owner.

 _“Thank you,”_ she whispered.

Paran lurched. The sensation registered all over Yamame’s body.

 _“… What’s that?”_ he whispered back.

 _“Thank you,”_ she said again. _“For… trusting me. Thank you.”_

_“… Wasn’t that your last order?”_

_“Were we still playing that?”_ chuckled Yamame.

 _“… No,”_ Paran admitted. _“Guess not.”_

Another, slower minute trailed after the first.

When it ended, Yamame spoke up.

“Mm. Paran?”

“… Yes?”

“If you’d like,” she said, “if you _want_ to, we can… Mm. We can go back to… to what we were doing before, you know.”

The human’s replying sigh tumbled down the back of Yamame’s neck. “… I’d only just managed to distract myself from that.”

“Had you?” Yamame teased. “You were doing… that thing, to my ear, again. You know?”

“… I know what I was doing.”

 _Which is it?_ Yamame wanted to ask; but, no sooner than the thought had spun, her human was again blowing hot words into her ear.

“… Aren’t we going too fast?” he said.

“Aren’t we going too fast _with what?_ ”

“This.”

 _This, meaning our touching rituals,_ Yamame concluded. A moment, she considered playing at a bit of wilful ignorance; then, giving it up, she instead asked her human, “There’s a timetable for these things?”

“Timetable – no,” he told her. “A… propriety – usually.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” said Yamame. “I don’t know about human propriety, or timetables. All I know is that it feels good – or,” she quickly corrected, “that it doesn’t feel _wrong._ Are we… um. Are we going too fast _for you?_ ”

A pause preceded any answer which Yamame may or may not receive. The pause was pregnant with the sounds of a great internal struggle cutting bloody swaths into the human’s resolve. Then, out from the turmoil, the conflict and disaccord, the bloodied and beaten victor at long last emerged.

The victor’s name was a surrendering, “… No.”

It was the best name Yamame Kurodani would have had for it. “Then,” she began, excitedly, “do you want to go back to—”

“One thing,” her human rode her over. “One thing. I’m going to do one thing. Then we go to sleep.”

“But you said—”

“And, on a condition,” Paran cut in again. Two record interruptions in a row delivered, the human shifted inside Yamame’s embrace. “Make no mistake, Yamame,” he told her gravely, “I’m going to be very annoying beginning tomorrow. Tonight, though… Tonight, I need to make sure I’m… still in control. So… One thing. No more. OK?”

Yamame Kurodani willed away the clinch of disappointment bracketing around her heart. “… OK,” she gave up. “OK, Paran. One thing. Fine. And the oh-so-terrible condition?”

“That if I _do_ try more than one thing,” said Paran, “then punch me.”

A giggle pushed out of Yamame in spite of her curdling humour. “Punch you? Really?”

“Punch me,” Paran confirmed. “Really.”

“Fine. I’ll punch you, if that’s what it takes.”

“… Cheers.”

Another frustrated squeeze clutched at Yamame Kurodani’s chest when her human pushed her away from himself. The squeeze was mistaken. The human hadn’t wished for Yamame to let go; only, whatever it was he was planning, evidently it required easier access to Yamame’s face.

The same face the human now stared at with an expression half-stitched-over with longing, and half – with subdued despair.

“… This is so unfair,” he groaned, pushing the blond hairs from Yamame’s cheek with the backs of his fingers.

“W—What’s unfair?” Yamame asked.

“You are,” replied her human.

… Then, he leaned in.

Yamame Kurodani closed her eyes.

Yamame Kurodani more than closed her eyes – she locked her mouth as well, and squelched her brows – but whatever misinformed instinct had led her to do so, was just that – misinformed. Yamame’s human had never meant to bite her. Nor had he meant to anything overmuch harmful; only to – very gently, as he had her shoulder and neck before – touch his lips to her exposed cheek.

And that was all.

At least it _had been_ all. It had been, until – _as with her shoulder and neck_ before – the human’s lips began slowly travelling across Yamame’s skin. Touch down and lift, move over, touch again. Touch and lift, and touch and lift…

… And then, touch alone, when the edge of his lips inevitably lapped over the corner of Yamame’s own.

Then, the human stopped.

He stopped.

His breath stopped.

His movements stopped.

The _entirety_ of Yamame’s favourite human had stopped, becoming as still as the air of Yamame’s home seemed still in the same moment.

And though her eyes were squeezed close, and her fists were squeezed close, and her blood was pumping in her ears – even over these, Yamame Kurodani, architect of the Underworld, realised the stopping _had been her cue._ The cue to make her own move. To keep her clause of the contract. To prevent the “one thing” her human had promised to her from becoming “many things,” which would then drive the much-desired sleep from his – and her – eyes.

To wit, the cue to _punch._

( ) Punch.  
( ) No punch.


	12. Chapter 12

(X) Punch.

So Yamame Kurodani punched.

Yamame Kurodani had thrown punches before. More than that: she had thrown, taken, sometimes pulled them (but not often); but among the many punches Yamame Kurodani had packed in her life, the one she unrolled now compared to none of its siblings. Not at all similar to the punch she had vended to one Parsee Mizuhashi, the time the green-gazed one had turned up at (and spoiled) one of the many Oni-thrown parties – nor whatsoever like the punch Nikuyama had received during the same party (markedly soon after the other one) for holding the drunken earth spider back.

This punch was not like those. This punch – if it could yet be called one – was of a softer spin. A nudge of the fist – nothing more. A poke with the knuckles. Slow and ineffectual. Weak. Unwilling.

And as Yamame had fully expected it… or had _hoped_ it would… all the punch did was make the human twitch in surprise.

This had two consequences. One: that his lips, already part overlaid on hers, briefly pressed down stronger. Two: that sensing this, an instinct jerking awake shoved her arms out against her human’s shoulders. Not a spider’s instinct – but _something else’s,_ rocketing out of a reservoir of Yamame she had not in a long time, perhaps not even an _ever_ -time, taken a careful look through.

When she opened her eyes, a human as red as a sheet of precious satin was grimacing at her from less than a hand-span away.

Yamame Kurodani, who did not for a moment doubt she was actively rivalling the human in tincture, suddenly felt as dumb as the dumbest fairy in Old Hell. Not to say she hadn’t been feeling dumb already; but, when at once her heart was relieved nothing too much had happened, and _insanely happy_ that _something had_ , it was an earth spider’s inviolable right to think herself more foolish than the rule.

Paran, as it seemed another rule, was the first to find his voice.

“… Cheers,” he told the pushing earth spider. It was a voice – and a “cheers” – as cheerless and empty of gratitude as it was humanly possible.

“… No problem,” Yamame returned – and it was a “no problem” as problematic as an earth spider could spiderly make it.

Nor did the problems end there. It took Yamame the worst and the best of herself to tear out of her human’s embrace and stand up to two very wobbly feet. The worst – to break said embrace effortlessly with her preternatural strength; the best – not to hate him for making her do so in the first place. Not three ticks of the clock’s quickest hand, and the human behind her spoke again.

“… Yamame?”

Yamame’s fingers curled into claws at the sound of her own name. “… I’m going to bed,” she announced, not turning around. “That’s what we promised, right?”

“A question first,” said Paran, “if I can.”

“Go ahead,” Yamame allowed. “Quickly. I want to get some sleep myself.”

“All right.” Her human drew a deeper breath before asking. “Would that… have been safe?”

“Would _what_ have been safe?” Yamame demanded. “Speak clearly.”

Paran swallowed audibly. “Would your mou—… Your lips,” he corrected. “Your lips. Would they have been… safe?”

Yamame Kurodani – once again – mustered out her best so as not to let her feelings for her human become stained black. _Now?_ she thought, _Now he asks me that?_ The tips of her fingernails dug into her palms. “… Which part,” she muttered, “of ‘controls diseases’ did you not understand? ‘Controls?’ I’m a spider. A twice-damned, stupid, silly spider. I’m venomous – not _toxic._ ”

“Then—”

“Yes.” Yamame wrestled against the urge to turn around after all. It was not an even match. “My… _It_ would have been safe. Very, very, _very_ safe. Safer than… than messing up my dress. That, right there, was unsafe. This is my favourite dress, you know. My very, very favourite. My lips are… nothing. They’re nothing. OK? They’re nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

“Nothing?” asked Paran.

“Nothing,” Yamame assured, with all the surety it warranted. Though whether the spinstress herself was assured (of what she had meant, for one) remained a frustrated uncertainty. “A—Anyway,” she went on, before frustration curdled into flustering, “if that’s all the questions you had, then we had better… had _best_ go now, because… because it’s getting really, really late – really. I’ve… I’ve got the project to wrap up, too, before I get knocked off my web. I’ve still got a lot of work to do. The landscaping – it’s really going to be a lot of work.”

“Right,” agreed Paran. “A lot of work.”

“Yes,” said Yamame. “A lot of work. So…”

“So?”

“So _good-night!_ ” Yamame groaned, irritated, skittering for her bedroom door. “That’s what! _Good-night,_ Paran!”

 _You stupid idiot,_ she added inside.

At the door (but safely past its frame) about to bash it shut behind her, Yamame Kurodani snuck one final glance tonight at her salon’s recently overbusied sofa.

A broken, broken man lay with his head pushed into its backrest, one limp arm slung across his eyes. A broken, dejected man, who – had Yamame been someone else, sometime else, and elsewhere – she may have suspected must have had a great debt attached to his name, or an ages-long vow ruined in a flight of fancy. On the inverse, had that someone else, sometime else, and elsewhere been Yamame Kurodani right now, they may have rushed over to comfort this man. To tell him that, in the long run, the greater scheme of things, debts, vows, other such human things – they licensed very little real importance. That life, as the gods so adored by humanity, had forgiven greater sins before. Those who may have been Yamame would be cruelly tempted to do so – if nothing more.

Yamame Kurodani in actual shut the door instead. The spring-loaded latch slid into place with a dull ring.

The spinstress tottered across her room and crashed, face-first, into her rumpled beddings.

There, in the messy sheets, blankets and pillows, Yamame Kurodani asked a certain part of herself what it was she was supposed to feel. The part which, Yamame knew, had for countless years been inside her most basic lining. The part which, paltry three days before, had told her _outright_ paying court to touching and other human nonsenses was disparaging a mighty _youkai_ such as she.

To her mounting misery, that part of Yamame Kurodani was three days dead.

* * *

The following morning, Yamame would learn two things.

A spider overstrained, told the first of these, slept very well regardless of an inside upheaval. As Yamame Kurodani was a spider beyond all doubt, so too did she sleep very well – regardless of a swelling in her heart refusing to heal. So well had Yamame Kurodani slept, in fact, and risen so early, that when she dug out of her sheets and quit her bedroom, her favourite human – who would be seen preparing to or breaking his fast already by this happening – was nowhere in evidence in the kitchen.

Though Yamame had met this reality with a blunted disappointment (why did she – questions like these by now were naïve), she put a fire under the stove all the same, and put on a tall stockpot of cold stream-water. When the water had heated enough so as to be little under boiling, Yamame grabbed the huge pot in two hands, and shuffled out the back-door, beyond which the little shower-cabin she and her human had built long months before was standing.

A delightful half hour later, Yamame Kurodani, wrapped in an earthen bathrobe embroidered with fractal patterns, walked back in through the same door. Towelling her hair (and promising herself to lash it back up soon), flushed and soap-scented, Yamame shuffled across the kitchen, then for her cosy salon, where she would complete her morning rituals on the cushions of her sofa.

And there, on that very sofa, as though waiting for this very Yamame to come in, was the very human Paran.

An addendum to the previous thing Yamame Kurodani had learned: a spider overstrained slept well. A human overstrained – patently not very much. This human must have slept poorly – shadows circled his eyes; all the same, when the spinstress loomed in the periphery of his sight, accordingly the human’s head was turned, and a smile amiably offered.

“Hello.”

“Hey.”

No further words but these; but for the time, Yamame was satisfied sitting down beside him and re-ordering her hair. The human was silently watching; still, beneath any vexation that may or may not have appeared to her mind at him doing so first thing in the morning, Yamame Kurodani felt on some level a touch gratified.

It was when Yamame was rolling her hair into a bun and tying it up with her second favourite bow, that her human (first of the favourites himself) spoke what was on his mind.

What was, was Yamame.

“Yamame.”

Or at least her name; but Yamame Kurodani obliged. “Mhm? What is it, Paran?”

“… A question.”

“Of course,” Yamame chuckled. The word was growing to be a regular snake. “Shoot. I’ll have some questions before I have breakfast, why not. You _are_ making breakfast, too. I don’t care how short you’ve slept. It’s morning, and there’s work to be done. Well?”

“Yes, of course,” said Paran first of all. “As for my question…” There was a pause. Then, Yamame’s human spat the question out all at once. “Yesterday,” he said. “Yesterday, did I lose?”

The spinstress froze with her fingers tangled up in hair and ribbon. Yet when she faced her human, no mockery – or japery, or even shame – was visible. “What…” Yamame choked out, “What _exactly_ do you mean?”

“Our game,” said Paran, so serious that, had one trundled by, the roll-bellied Yama may well take him for one of their number and employ him. “Our game yesterday – did I lose it?”

( ) No.  
( ) Yes.

* * *

(X) No.

Winning and losing. This was intimate territory to Yamame’s mind, and well-trodden; but often though she had gamed with the Oni on which could faster empty a keg, or have the other drunk under the table, this game’s convolutions were – in the absence of a cleverer turn of phrase – by half more convoluted.

So Yamame Kurodani carefully recounted the rules in her head. So her heart flittered inside its cage when she recalled her adamant delivery of the terms. So her fangs pinched her lower lip as – one by one, from embarrassing start to agonising finish – she examined each and succeeding round of the game for earmarks of victory.

None were making themselves marked.

Yamame Kurodani, surrendering, nudged her head weakly left and right. “See,” she said, “I don’t think either one of us had the win.”

A slow, unexpected frown compressed the human’s brows in answer.

“… Is that so?” he asked.

Yamame shaped a powerless smile. “Isn’t it, though? We were interrupted. Ahead of that, neither one of us was failing too spectacularly. And afterwards… Well, _afterwards_ we both soundly gave it up. So, there’s no winner here; none, maybe but whoever managed to chase an earth spider under her bed merely by smashing down her front door. That one won her own game. Not me, that’s for certain.”

“Not you?”

“Not me,” the spinstress shook her head again. “Me, I’m about the only one who lost… things. My own game and… and more.”

“… How do you figure?”

“The… The last order,” Yamame flinched re-recalling; “before our visitor – you told me to… to turn around, yes? Twice, at that – and I didn’t. All right, we _were_ interrupted, I grant you; but, if you want to get technical, that there was the last turn – _your_ turn, and your order. So, if you want to get technical, I lost our game. You didn’t. You got your prize, even. We went to bed. To sleep. That _was_ your prize, wasn’t it? So no. If you want to get technical, you didn’t lose anything. The only silly one who did was—”

“I didn’t want to get technical.”

Yamame Kurodani, her own brows meeting above her nose, looked to the side at her human.

Paran was fingering his eyelids. Then, Paran _wasn’t_ fingering his eyelids; and, so released, his eyes wrenched open to give to Yamame a stare which pinned her to her half of the sofa. Not _too_ long hers alone; for then, surprising her stone-still, the human reached out a yearning hand…

… And touched it to one of Yamame’s feverish cheeks.

Here was the _second_ thing Yamame Kurodani would learn this morning. That a spider, however far strayed, could never escape completely from her own self. That, with time – and space, and separation – away from whatever had run it to its burrow, the spider would, as clothes stuffed in the farthest end of the wardrobe do, eventually become unearthed again. That, in the same fell comeback, it would string the muscles of her fingers taut – letting Yamame’s ribbon to fall on her lap, and her golden hair to spill down her shoulders. That – and this was the scary part – the spider would slip _entirely_ beneath the human’s lulled notice.

The human’s and – what was even scarier – _her very own_ as well.

“Yamame.”

“Ye—Yes?” yelped Yamame, clamping down so hard on her rousing instincts the Buddhist Hijiri would have welcomed her instantly with open arms. “What… What is it?”

Her human sounded pained. “… You look amazing with your hair down.”

Yamame Kurodani swallowed a globe of spit. “Then why… Why do _you_ look like you’re upset?”

The human Paran removed his hand. Then, standing up, he gave to the spinstress a smile so sweet, so saccharine, almost at once Yamame Kurodani knew mistakes had been made – and _not_ by him.

“Figure it out,” he told her gently, and headed for the kitchen.

* * *


	13. Chapter 13

Yamame Kurodani did not figure it out.

Yamame Kurodani _could not_ figure it out. Certainly not before her human called her over to breakfast – nor after they had finished wearing out their supply of delicacies in (what may be imagined as something even quieter than) their regular quiet. Not before the human stood up and hurled himself into clean-up routines – nor after he had shooed Yamame off to her own assignments. Not before the spinstress huffed an exasperated, “Snake!”… Nor after she had clicked the door of her study firmly shut behind her back.

Yamame Kurodani could not figure it out. But, much though she would sigh all over it afterwards, once her brain had swapped frustrating words for ink and lambskin, lines and curves and figures, what matter her human’s unspoken offences had made was fast unspooled into irrelevance.

Across the next hours, an unobtrusive (but still obscuring) hummock was raised from the surrounds of the bath-house described on the parchment, as was a tasteful parterre – with flowerbeds and winding flagstone paseos for the bathers to walk and moult the excess heat. A small arbour – to sit and take tea in – as well. Almost, and Yamame Kurodani, the Underworld’s most tireless architect, would have – for no reason but her creativity desired – added in tables for _shōgi_ and other entertainments to the project, too; then, however – and it was a “however” as brusque as an overlarge prey tearing down a web – the flow of peaceful, productive hours was abruptly staunched.

The stopper to these hours… was a knock on her sanctum’s door. Against and despite the inner architect Yamame raging for having to put down her pencils, the outer, physical Yamame put on a pretty, welcoming smile, and turned around in her chair to call out:

“Yes? Come on in!”

Yamame’s smile brightened first – then shrivelled up and became a lack of one, as Paran’s own lack of smile unfolded into view. The human, stiffly, inched the door ajar till just the breadth of his head may be squeezed through. Which it then promptly was.

“… Visitors,” the frowning head announced.

And visitors they audibly were.

A voice, which could not have been Paran’s – less the man were magickally turned fifteen years younger and the opposite sex – spoke in irritable tones from the other side sooner than either Yamame or her human could do anything else to precede it.

“Would you _kindly?_ ” the visitor complained. “I know how to swivel a door, thank you. I’m not an invalid.”

Paran’s face turned fifteen years but older in – and for – and instant; then, sighing, Yamame’s favourite human shoved the offending door to the limit of its openness.

What stood with its hands mounted irascibly on its hips behind it, scowling a tiny scowl up at Yamame’s human, was something which – had the Underworld not been the Underworld, and Yamame’s home not Yamame’s home – could be mistaken for a female human nestling. As tall (or short) as Paran’s waist, no wider than half of Yamame’s favourite; but what this visitor lacked for in dimensions, the confidence with which she carried them became the responsibilities attached to her name. For here was one belonged to the Underworld’s mind-reader clan. Here was a woman of the _Komeiji_ family – small though they were, all the same governors of the underground realm since uncountable years. Stuffed inside a dumpy, flower-patterned cloak (no doubt to ward off the tunnels’ cold), the bottom end dragging miserably on the floor; but mode of dress was no status indicator in the Underworld – and a Komeiji was a Komeiji, no difference.

“Never mind,” sighed the Komeiji girl, genuinely more fit to be lifted and spun than for governance. “Never mind. Have it your way. _Menfolk…_ Hello there, Kurodani. Good day. I’m not interrupting, am I?”

Joined with the Komeiji’s levered attention, Yamame Kurodani, mother of plagues – but for all intents and purposes mistress of the house as well – picked herself up from her chair, and bowed her head. “Good day,” she replied. “Um, I’ll be honest—”

“You will, too.”

“… I _was_ at work just now,” Yamame finished, the edges of her mouth quirking. “Although, likely that doesn’t account for very much anymore. Now you’re here anyway, I mean.”

“Not much,” agreed the Komeiji; “and I _am_ here anyway, yes. Now, now, Kurodani, don’t take this otherwise than it is – I don’t mean to keep a genius mind away from its entertainment overlong. Those need their release – else things happen. Things which neither of us could _possibly_ regret more than the other. As a matter of— ugh, _in point_ ,” the little governess stressed, as though correcting a mistake, “ _in point_ of fact, I’ve still more chores of my own to tick off today. So say, Kurodani – why do we not sit down, and get it out of both of our ways at once? Hmm? Pretty please; and, if you would, don’t make it too hard a ‘please,’ either,” she added. “I know you don’t like us a lot; but, as someone I know says: not liking someone doesn’t mean we should want to make their every waking moment a tragedy.”

Yamame lifted a brow. “Visiting me is a tragedy?”

The Komeiji girl humoured the jab with a tiny chuckle. “I saw that coming,” she said; “but no, not really. The caves are, and that cold. I hate that cold – and the quicker we are done here, the quicker I’ll be able to get past what I need to get past of it to get back home. Well?”

“… All right,” Yamame gave up. “Very good. I’ll make—”

The little governess shrugged an arm out of her cloak, raising a hand up. “Thanks all the same,” she said, “but no need to make it official. Tea would make it. As a— bother, _in point_ of fact, all I want is to ask you a few questions. The tea wouldn’t even cool enough to drink. So I promise you. Send your concierge away – he’s giving my brain an ache – and I’ll be gone sooner than you can decide if I’m bothering you at all, or if you should perhaps report me. So _pretty please_ , Kurodani – pretty, pretty please.”

Yamame didn’t please – not yet at any rate; instead, she glanced over to where the man Paran – poised like a snake – was hovering above the Komeiji girl. The glance caught; and, sensing it, Yamame’s human quit eyeing the little governess and her cloak. Very faintly, Yamame shook her head. Very faintly, the human nodded his. Then, less faintly, he stepped out of the doorway to allow the Komeiji through.

Once she was, he shut it close again, with himself outside. A sprinkling of heavy footfalls, and he returned to whatever it was he had been doing before. Cleaning? Not unthinkable; but for Yamame’s bedroom, the house had not seen a mote of dust for months. Nor had the stove puffed stored-up soot, or dirt screech underfoot on the floorboards. _Concierge,_ Yamame repeated inside her thoughts. It was a prettier word than “caretaker” and no mistake; but, she weirdly discovered, less intimate. Colder. More impersonal. Not _the one she wanted._

Had she not been turned away, the Komeiji girl – who was, _in point_ of fact, turned just so – could have caught the mother of plagues, Yamame Kurodani, bite down on her lower lip in frustration. She didn’t. The little governess was stuck, glaring after the departed Paran, as though the human had given her an insult the daughter of the Komeiji had at once fully expected, but silently hoped would pass her by.

“Why?” she was muttering under her nose. “ _Why_ do they do that? Why?”

Yamame Kurodani blinked away her strange grievances (not too far, but far enough) – then did so again, when the Komeiji girl turned around, and revealed her own lower lip to be squeezed between little white teeth.

“Why do they do what?” Yamame asked, her curiosity speaking before her mislike of her guest.

The Komeiji girl was a picture of ruffled pride. “The doors!” she moaned. “The deuced doors! It’s just a slab of wood with a handle on the side. Why do men think we can’t operate those by ourselves? It isn’t _sorcery!_ Argh, it just… just gets up in my hair so much! So much in my hair!”

Yamame Kurodani, mother of plagues, met this new – but not unknown – plague with a sympathetic smile. Very little though it was, it was gratifying just the same.

Men and architecture weren’t, after all, troubles exclusive to herself.

* * *

Twenty minutes later, Yamame quit her bedroom possessed of a twain of new things.

The first of these was an opinion. The second was a clear heart.

“Well, did you?”

These had been the Komeiji’s first words – after she had seated herself in Yamame’s chair, and Yamame – on her unmade bed.

“Well, did I what?” Yamame had returned.

The Komeiji’s patience had not been sewn with a thread which stretched much; and, the piece of her mind given what she thought of Yamame’s hostility (not much), and how much easier she would make it by answering straight (much, much), the little governess had restated her question.

“I didn’t kill anyone,” Yamame had insisted.

This had been good enough for the Komeiji. “That’s good enough for me,” she had said. “Good. It’s beneath you, and we would have been very put off if you had. Now, Kurodani. Why do you not tell me a bit about your work? What have you been poring over recently?” Once Yamame had picked her jaw up from her lap, and given a voice to her confusion (a suspicious voice) at such a dramatic transition, the little governess had laughed. “Mind, Kurodani,” she had told the frowning earth spider. “Hate us, deride us, push us away all your heart desires; but no matter your hate, we will always be – and have always been – on your side. Obscure, prevaricate, dissemble and delay all you want – but we will have already ascertained what needed be ascertained. The Moon-doctor’s pet spoke of spider poison, and yet this is not how you would have killed. Without this door is a scrumptious young human, ripe to sate all manner of appetites, and yet he is lacking for no livelihood. Behind me on the desk is evidence of higher pursuits than satisfying a petty instinct. The entire case is a foregone conclusion, Kurodani. Why have I dragged my feet all the way up here then, you’re wondering? This is because, in the eventuality the aforesaid pet comes to bother us again, my family wants something to rub in their face to demonstrate how useless they are being, and how productive _you_ have been compared to them. That’s all. Mind, Kurodani. We _will_ be putting your sisters to the question; they are more excitable than you, and closer the description – but you… You are their elder. That human we mentioned? He is proof – _maddening_ proof, but proof – perhaps also their better. Taking after the _best,_ perhaps.

“So you see, Kurodani,” the Komeiji had finished, smiling an impatient smile. “So you see – we are on your side. Notwithstanding how much you hate us, how much we are up in _your_ hair, or how enervating you find our attentions – interests of the Underworld are always first to our minds. This is what I’ve been taught, and this is what I mean to propagate. So, to aid this noble, noble mission of mine… Give me _something_ with which I could send a useless pet back to their master short of an ear – pretty, _pretty_ please, Kurodani. The more, in point of fact, the better.”

That had been when Yamame had received her clear heart. The opinion had followed in a short time; and the opinion was this: that a Komeiji (or _this_ Komeiji at least) made for as good and graceful a listener as a victim of listening to twice the architectural declamation at once (spoken and thought) might be. More graceful, for certain, than _some_ Yamame had boasted to until now.

Twenty and one minute later, Yamame Kurodani, the Underworld’s greatest architect reaffirmed, stood in the entranceway of her house, watching one of the dreaded Komeiji mind-readers wrestle with the laces of her high travel boots.

Yamame’s human – one who, someway, somehow, somewise, had aided in establishing her innocence simply by _being without the door_ – was now beside her, as well watching the little governess’s efforts. As not to agitate, enervate, or madden the recently smoothed-out mind-reader, Yamame held on to one of the human’s arms – keeping him well, and away, the front door, which – if opened by the wrong hand – might again ruche the delicate Kurodani-Komeijic relations.

The Komeiji girl at last tightened the laces on the twelfth tier (of fifteen) of eyelets on her boots, and gave both her hosts the benefit of her stately full height of two-thirds Yamame.

“Off to catch more spiders, then,” said the little governess, clapping her hands on her sides. “That, or the chill. Maybe both? Gods above, I hope not.” Then, very plainly noticing something – something in the arrangement of Yamame and her human – the girl’s little nose twitched with a nosiness worthy of a nose thrice the size. _Paran’s, maybe._ “Indulge me, Kurodani,” said the Komeiji, eyes narrowing. “Other than that you work together – far as I gather – what kind of… association do you two have, anyway?”

“Association?” Yamame looked up at her human. “What kind of association _do_ we have?”

Paran looked down at Yamame. A Paran’s worth of words purled out of his mouth. This left the mouth resolutely closed, and the words at a secure count of zero.

“What I meant,” the Komeiji girl explained, “is what kind of _relationship_ you two have. _Other_ than that you work together. This is known.”

Yamame – again – looked up at her human.

This time – and she discovered this as the human sternly looked back – it was suddenly her mouth that wasn’t opening.

( ) Partners.  
( ) Partners…?  
( ) ???

* * *

(X) Partners.

“… Partners.” The statement was delivered with Yamame’s voice, from Yamame’s lips, off of Yamame’s tongue. All but, and Yamame would have thought herself the deliverer. “We’re… We’re partners,” she said – in this instance quite consciously – eyes gliding back over to the Komeiji girl. “Mhm,” she nodded. “That’s probably the best word to put to it. We work together, live together, and trade services. That makes us partners – doesn’t it?”

The little governess’s brows rose halfway up her forehead. “Is that so, now?”

“We work together, live together, and trade services,” Yamame repeated. “Paran handles talks for me on the surface; in return, I lend him a roof over his head and food for his plate. He negotiates and ferries my payments, and in return, I… lend him a roof… and food for his plate. He cooks said food and keeps the house habitable, and in return… Well, there’s the roof – and the food.” The spinstress felt an ungainly pink slowly working up her face. “All right. Maybe it isn’t very _balanced,_ ” she confessed; “but it’s still a partnership! It is, isn’t it… right?”

The Komeiji girl said nothing; only, coquettishly tilting her little head, she slid her gaze diagonally up and to the side of the flushing Yamame.

Had Yamame Kurodani been quicker on the pick-up, she might have done the same the mind-reader had. Had Yamame’s human _not_ been wrenching his arm out of Yamame’s hold – or looping it round her back, or grabbing her by the flank, or scaring the earth spider corpse-stiff doing so – she might, if nothing else, have done _something_ to hedge against the previously slow pink exploding red all over her face. Had those been the case, Yamame Kurodani might then stop her human from leaning down; she might swat away the fingers parting her hair. Most of all, Yamame Kurodani – had she but not been the surprised Yamame Kurodani she was – might not have the human pressing his lips to her cheek in full sight of their visitor.

The Yamame Kurodani she was, needless to say, did the explicit opposite to the above.

A moment later, as gently as tugging down a wallpaper to be reapplied soon, Yamame’s favourite human pulled his trespassing lips away.

“… Those kinds of partners,” he told her, his expression very serious, “they _don’t_ do this, Yamame.”

Yamame Kurodani, mother of plagues, the yearly malady, had a great many replies to be given out in occasions like these. Many of those replies were clipped and easy to articulate – permutations of “Why?!” and “Stupid!” and “Snake!” and likewise; but whatever were pushing now out of her clamping throat, were blown away in a gust of clamorous, belly-hugging laughter.

Not her laughter – but the laughter of the Komeiji girl, now bent over and afoul of the nastiest bout of cackles.

“Oh my,” the tiny mind-reader gasped past the bouts. “Oh my, oh no… Oh dear, dear me. Mother is going to turn _purple_ once she hears about this. Totally, totally purple! Taking after ‘the best,’ indeed! Oh dearest, dearest me…”

The youngest of the Komeiji, righting herself, wiped the tears from her autumn-sky eyes with a sleeve of her flowery coat.

“Oh my,” she said. “Well, I did ask. My mistake, and my stomach.” The Komeiji girl shook her head. Then, she grinned. “Gods above, Kurodani. Hope to Old Hell this one hasn’t had anything terrifying bound to him. Those kinds of men are _the worst._ ”

* * *

Whatever else to which Paran had been bound, nothing else than infinite diligence was manifesting.

The Komeiji girl sent off and fare-welled, two blinks of an eye had already seen Yamame’s human launched off again toward the kitchen. Must have been the same diligence, then (for what else, the earth spider couldn’t imagine), which had whipped him around when Yamame’s voice (nowhere so obedient) had at last worked out of her mouth.

“Stop right there!”

The voice had been rendered shrill by the pressures battling inside Yamame’s body – but it had worked, and that was everything that made a difference in the end. No deliberation had preceded it; still, when the human had matched her glare, it had all been very deliberate.

“… Yes?” Paran had asked, as equable as a brick wall. “What is it?”

Yamame Kurodani, never one to let a challenge pass, had taken the question and spun it around. “What _was_ it, you mean!” she had said. “What _was_ that? What were you thinking? Why? What was that even _about_?”

“What was even _what_ about?”

“Cheek!” Yamame had spat, “Touching! And in front of Komeiji’s brat, too!”

Paran, brows rumpling, had folded his arms. “… What about it?”

Yamame had swallowed. “We weren’t…! That wasn’t…! I’d thought that was just _for us_!”

The human had not relented. “Isn’t it? I didn’t touch the girl.”

“That’s not what I—!” Yamame had begun.

Then, however – spearing through whatever arguments were still issuing from the earth spider’s throat – her favourite human _had smiled._ “… I did warn you,” he had told her, even as Yamame’s jaw had stuck so fast it might well have been nailed close. “I did warn you, didn’t I? That I’d be ‘very annoying starting today.’ Well. Here you have it, Yamame. Altogether your lapse.”

The human had uncurled his smile at having delivered these words; and then, leaving the earth spider with a beetroot for a face and porridge for wits, he had withdrawn – to whatever all-important house-chore had been interrupted by the Komeiji girl’s visiting.

It had been hours since; and Yamame Kurodani, she who had faulted her human with a brick wall’s stubbornness, now sheathed her drawing tools in the drawers of her desk, below a now all-but-complete draft of _Myouren-ji_ ’s bathhouse-to-be.

A list of invoices had been drawn up as well as lines and angles: names atop names atop names of material and materiel the Underworld’s architect and her associates would require from the priestess Hijiri. None too sparing, perhaps – beside hitherto projects her crew had taken under; but any overhead was a bargaining ground, and those may be taken or given in the midst and mists of negotiations. Negotiations which – if he was yet himself – Yamame’s human would, in the coming days, carry to _Myouren-ji_ ’s large-hearted master. Time would tell _how_ large.

As for Yamame Kurodani, bound in the present, this marked the extent of her duties for the meanwhile; and the spinstress, stretching all four of her limbs, quit her chair, as well as her bedroom, and went off to find him whose own duties were yet to be satisfied.

This much she found in her salon – fixed once more atop her sofa, wreathed in a smell of cleaning salts, with the still-unfinished book opened on his lap. As she quietly approached, Yamame – undetectable on her bare feet – tugged the bow out of her hair; then, over and across the arm-rest of the sofa, the earth spider jumped – landing on her haunches at her human’s side. Though _not_ the heaviest among her sisters ( _certainly_ nowhere near the top), all the same the cushions rippled underneath Yamame, and – as certain as a fly catching in the far end of a web – so too did this motion travel on, until it broke the human’s notice.

No notice harder to break than Paran’s; but with enough spider ( _still_ not the heaviest), that as well was doable.

Yamame’s favourite human shut his book. Then, as though expecting her all along, he turned – very calmly – and met with an earth spider after reparations.

For all the good it did his near future, he did short, good work of whatever surprise he had for Yamame’s appearance. “… Take it the project’s done, then,” he said. “… Is it?”

Yamame gave a nod. “Yes. The project – and figures; I’ve got everything done Hijiri may want to see.”

“Can _I_ see?”

“No.”

Had Yamame Kurodani not been the genius she was, she might have considered the human’s shaping frown a compliment for her work’s limitless attraction; yet since a genius she was, the Underworld’s architect held her celebrations off. “Not _yet_ , anyhow,” she calmed her human down; “it isn’t even evening, yet. I’ll fill you in on everything, of course – so you know what exactly you’re dropping on Hijiri’s head – but not yet. No. Not yet.”

Paran’s brows began relaxing. It was a slow, careful motion – but there it was. “… When?”

“Later. After this. Maybe tomorrow.” Yamame bored her spider eyes into her human’s. “… I’ve let my hair down for you, you know.”

The human’s brows stopped relaxing. “… I see that,” he drawled. “… Why?”

“It’s not yesterday anymore.”

“… It isn’t,” Paran agreed, though not before taking a deeper breath. “It hasn’t been since morning, really.” The comment struck a wrong thread in Yamame’s mind; but sooner than she could untangle its meaning, her favourite human put his book away and demanded, “… So what?”

 _Had_ it been a demand? But Yamame Kurodani was too far woven into her own visions of the next few minutes to allow for sidelights on her human’s less understandable quirks. There was only one quirk which mattered now. The same quirk which, days before, Yamame Kurodani would have called human.

Now, all evidence presented, it seemed it was an earth spider’s as well.

( ) Go for the kill.  
( ) The kill will come to her.


	14. Big small strides

(X) Go for the kill.

And an earth spider, opposite to humanity, needed not moderate her quirks.

So – an earth spider yet, despite recent slights – Yamame Kurodani rose up on her knees. So the greatest of spinstresses fixed her hands on the human’s shoulders. So the mother of plagues – afflicted more herself as of late – matched her amber gaze against that of her partner’s. So she swallowed down the itch to curl up and roll away when the match was joined very well.

“I’m…” Yamame began, “… going to _do_ something. Steady for me a little, OK?”

“What is that?” the human asked.

“Something to do with _touching._ ”

“… What is that?” he asked again.

“Something you _didn’t_ do yesterday,” Yamame explained. “Something you didn’t… _want_ to do yesterday. That. That something.”

The human’s shoulders tensed up – then sagged. “… I see,” he gave up. “… Very good.”

Yamame giggled her nervousness. “That’s it? ‘Very good?’ No bargaining?”

Paran’s head rotated left and right. “No,” he said. “… No,” he said once more, firmer. “I knew what it would be.”

“Still you aren’t going to try to run away?”

His lips curled up sardonically. “Would running have worked?”

“Maybe for a time,” Yamame allowed. “Then, I’d track you down. Then, I wouldn’t be so patient anymore. I’m not patient even now.”

There was a _wrong_ in the way her weight distributed on her human, and Yamame, the geometrical sage she was, let go of his shoulders, and looped her arms behind his neck instead. A fool’s hope had her impressed – for a moment – the human had leaned in the better to support said weight; but this impression went no further than the moment, and Paran’s expression remained as unsupportive as it had been.

Yamame’s impatience threatened collapse.

“So there,” she rounded off, at no point in particular. “There. That’s right. I’m going to touch you – and nothing else you say or do can head it off now. Not running. Not excuses. Nothing.”

“Nothing at all?” Paran wanted to know.

“Nothing at all,” Yamame told him, and it was all but a promise. “It is inevitable. You’re caught. Stuck. There’s no web, but you’re stuck all the same. There’s only one thing you can do now, and that’s to steady for me. So… _do_ steady for me, Paran. OK?”

“… I would have anyway,” Paran grunted in return.

Yamame Kurodani did not believe him. Not at all.

Yet belief – wherever it was by now, the elusive thing – came out unnecessary either way; and the human _did_ steady: straightened his back, shut close his eyes, even angled his head a few degrees to the side all in one smooth motion – as though all of these elements were crucial someway for what would follow.

They were, too; and Yamame – sliding even closer than she had been already – dimly came to understand how important each was to prevent further embarrassment for either one of them. For the further Yamame leant on her human, the more of her weight rested solely on his back. For the closer she was, the more apparent it became there would no longer be anywhere comfortable to set their eyes; and as for those delusorily few degrees at which his head was resting, Yamame found soon enough they smartly kept her nose from smashing painfully into his. Almost, and Yamame Kurodani – a spider seconds away from her goal – would have thought her human acquainted with being touched in this, unusual, way.

Almost… and she would have thought he had been, by _someone else,_ already.

The idea bubbled up to the surface of her mind, and instantly began to jell into an ugly skin; and had Yamame _not_ chosen just then to – at last – softly press her lips on her human’s, it may very well have soured the moment without reversal.

It was good, then, that she had.

The sensation – as many late sensations had been, where her human was involved – was novel.

Not the novelty of a stranger ritual being inflicted on her hands; nor that of a familiar one being laden with a new meaning. This novelty – it came from something external: external to the satisfaction of having achieved her desires, or having contested her shame and won said contest – external, even, to the faint, physical pleasure of her skin making intimate contact with somebody else’s. It was, in truth, external to any part of Yamame – whether the part was free, or engaged closely with her human.

What it wasn’t external to, was the human himself; and Yamame, a few long seconds more in the pass, at last put a word to this novel feeling.

It was _being trusted._

It had to be; though her human had given her _pieces_ of trust before, none had matched the trust he was now displaying. None had ever had him trust Yamame this far. None had, indeed, ever before had him allow the mother of plagues (insofar as anyone could _dis_ allow her from anything) this close to a part of himself so critical to his work – or indeed continued well-being. None had ever had him submit so completely to the whims of she, who could end this well-being with a thought. Most of all, none of them – even the flash of trust from the previous day, when they had been together in her bedroom – had ever made Yamame Kurodani’s tiny heart beat _this fast._

Was trust _supposed_ to do that? But Yamame Kurodani had no time to answer questions nobody anyway had asked; the human was making a distressed sound, and – with a pull of distress of her own – she remembered Paran had been keeping his breath inside him all the while.

Afoul of exceeding again her own principles and cursing whichever god had designed her human to be so dependent on air, Yamame broke the trust which he had so strenuously raised up from nothing.

The trust, the physical contact, all the rest – everything was broken together; and Yamame Kurodani, silently cursing, drew herself away.

And yet, when the human had sucked in his due of fresh air, and when he opened his eyes – first up to half-way, then with a rusty difficulty to full openness – her first thought was that she _liked those eyes._ Maybe not the eyes _themselves_ – for this would brand her tastes odder than the oddest of _youkai_ – but _the way they looked at her_ cut a good approximate for her confused feelings. It was an approximate which Yamame – unaccountably – found herself wishing extended to indefinity.

It did not extend that much. It did not extend _half_ as much.

It did not, in fact, extend as far as Paran’s mouth; but – once that, too, was opened – something else came out which arrested her attention.

“Here it is, then,” the mouth was saying. “All the work you did, right there. Months. You ass. You twice-folly-loving ass.”

* * *

Twice-folly-loving Yamame blinked. “W—What?”

Paran’s eyes – those delightful eyes – gave a blinking of their own; and – as though only now noticing the earth spider with whom he had been sharing something which, as far as Yamame’s understanding, one did not share with those they had but recently noticed – his stare became a little wild.

“Uh—”

Throughout the next moments, the human Paran went through a peculiar sequence of changes. This was, perhaps, the _least_ which could be said of a human who, in the span of the previous minute, had survived both the attentions of an earth spider _and_ calling her a donkey. Still yet, for all the trust he had shown her, Yamame Kurodani was determined the end of these changes should (if nothing else) offer at least a feasible connection between the two.

It didn’t. Less – for whatever the connection was, Yamame, apparently, wasn’t it.

“… Not you,” said Paran, having gone from panic-Paran, through a shame-faced Paran, to a Paran who, had he but the ability, would burrow between the cushions of the sofa and die. “Not you, Yamame,” this last Paran groaned, denied his desires. “Just…”

“Just what?”

A fourth version of Paran came on then, and this one had its hand firmly plastered over its face. “… Me,” it said. “Just me. _All_ me.”

“That is selfish,” joked Yamame. No humour came out of it. “I don’t understand, you know. What _about_ you? You did fine.”

“Still alive, yes,” Paran joked back. It made for two stillborn jokes that afternoon. “As well you don’t understand, Yamame,” the human sighed. “It is easy for you, because you’ve got a lot of pride to spare. Me – not so. That’s why this is so… difficult.”

Yamame’s chest squeezed. “It costs you pride to do these things with me?”

“Yes. A lot.”

Yamame Kurodani, the yearly malady, took in a sharp breath. It was a stopgap measure. A stopgap measure and a desperate bid – a bid not to burst into a spray of wounded pride and other emotional shrapnel. As good, so, that the gap was swiftly filled in by something else.

The something was the wounded pride of someone else.

Paran was choking. Not on anything physical; but, where the frailties of human physiology were in play, words, apparently, were enough to stop up a man’s throat. “That’s—” he rattled out at last, “That’s not it, Yamame. Not because— Not because you’re—”

“Not human?” she supplied.

Paran’s eyes shut, and his head wriggled left and right, pained. “That’s not it,” he restated. “That’s… not it at all. You’ll recall I’ve… _kissed you,_ before, yes? Once… _Almost_ twice; and I didn’t forget for a moment what – who – you were, either. Still did it. So, no.” He shook his head again. “That’s not it.”

“What is it, then?”

Paran’s eyes laboriously inched open. Though if this had been to do the obvious and allow him to see Yamame again, the part of her which lay the greatest hold of his attention was, evidently, located someplace on her waist.

With the kind of lateness too frequent recently, Yamame Kurodani, the spinstress with the most interesting waist, became conscious her arms had remained steadily hooked around her human all throughout their talk. This, maybe immediate to an outside observer, feature of their present arrangement now had the earth spider realising, all of a sudden, that her human was still firmly within…

 _What was that?_ Yamame’s brows squished together. _Kissed?… Kissing._

… Still firmly within _kissing_ range. The thought… felt _wrong._ Not in terms of accuracy – this much any aforesaid observer could swear to; but to be within a striking distance from a human, and yet to crave nothing more than to touch her lips to theirs – _that_ was wrong. Wrong and unnatural. It was vulgar and forbidden, at once base and scandalous, and – as Yamame was quickly discovering – very, _very_ thrilling.

Too quickly, and almost too thrilling; but – in a trend of ongoing confusion – she felt somehow impossibly fragile as well. Not to be selfishly entertained. Nor was Yamame _about_ to selfishly entertain it; though the selfishness of the Underworld’s greatest architect was in some areas subject to naughty gossip. Still, something else had the alien thought run off. Almost, and Yamame would in fact have lost it completely, when her human spoke again.

_Almost._

“Would you accept,” sighed the human, “if I told you I have been wrong?”

“That’s it?” Yamame chuckled. “We’ve all been. I have been – and do you see me shedding pride about it?”

“Twice?” Paran pushed. “About the same thing – for months on end? No, this is different, Yamame.”

“What _have_ you been wrong about?”

As Yamame had before, now it was her human who inflated his chest with a breath designed to stave off a more volatile alternative. As Yamame had not, he released it in a low, vibrating chuckle, which left him altogether deflated in the end – in more meanings than one.

“See,” he said, “now that, I can’t think how to tell you _without_ clawing my eyes out.”

Those eyes having recently found an enthusiast in Yamame, she decided not to increase their peril any further. “Is it a human thing?” she asked instead. “I mean, what’s bothering your pride.”

Paran shook his head. “It’s a me thing.”

“A human thing, then.”

“A _man_ thing.”

“There’s a difference?”

A small, diffident smile broke out on the human’s face. “… Guess there isn’t.”

A fifth in the line of Parans of late imposed on Yamame now came on; this one – it seemed was rapidly losing an aspect of itself. As like, the final vestiges of pride were sloughing off; or enough of it anyway – for then, the touch with which Yamame had been gifting her human for a while now was at last returned.

At first, it was her shoulders and they alone; then, as though at once hesitant but aware of the final destination, the human’s hands slowly travelled down Yamame’s sides, until stopping at her waist. The destination did not surprise her – not least because of Yamame’s previous observations – but the motion itself had somehow put her in a mind of running.

Yamame killed it off.

“So,” Paran murmured, digging his fingertips into the fabrics of her dress, “How… _was_ it?”

The spinstress cocked her head to the side. “How was what, now?”

The probing of the fingers ceased. Then, at once, it resumed – as though the stopping had been but a misfiring nerve.

“… Kissing me,” Paran half-said, half-coughed out. “How did it… _feel?_ ”

“Oh.” Yamame’s own nerves misfired. “Um. It felt… um.”

“… OK?” suggested her human.

The spinstress clutched at the offered thread. “Yes. OK. It felt… OK.” _Very OK._ “Or… not wrong. Maybe, if you hadn’t, you know, moved your head – then it might have been less OK. A cracked nose would have made it. Could have. Then, maybe if I’d timed myself better… Otherwise, it was OK. Yes. Very…”

“Very OK?”

Yamame nodded. “Very.”

“… Yamame?”

“Yes?”

“… You aren’t stupid,” her human said. “You _aren’t,_ so I’m only saying this once; but that… all of that… That was also a sign of affection. You… know this, yes?”

 _Now you are telling me?_ “… I knew,” said Yamame. “Of course I knew. So what?”

“No take-backs?”

“… No.” She shook her head. “No, no take-backs. I told you before, right? That I… liked you. So no, no take-backs. No. Hold on; in the first place, that doesn’t… How would I even—”

“Yamame.” Paran grunted. “I was joking.”

 _About which part?_ wondered Yamame. But the joke was done, and the only punchline which remained seemed a certain spinstress.

The human Paran, finality weighing down every motion, let go of the earth spider’s waist. A smile made of resignation was stretching out his lips when – for the first time since before Yamame’s kissing – his eyes re-joined hers in a quiet match. The match was nowhere as even as it had been then; though, even now, the Underworld’s architect couldn’t decide on the safer bet.

“So then,” said Paran. “Want to make routine out of this?”

Yamame frowned. “Routine?” The pick of the word had somehow struck her mental net at a crooked angle. “Why ‘routine?’ What’s wrong with ‘kissing?’”

“ _A_ routine,” Paran corrected. “Something regular. A rule.”

“Why is that?”

“To get used to it.” The human shrugged under her arms. “To get _you_ used to it.”

Yamame Kurodani scrunched up her mouth. Not as though she did not _want to;_ and yet, for all the _not_ biting she had exhibited, it looked as if her human had harboured a bite all the same. “I’m fine, Paran,” she told him. “I may have tripped up my timing, all right, but I’m fine. Yesterday, too – I was fine yesterday, and I’m fine today. More importantly, you are fine. Still… _alive,_ as you said. So, fine by any other name. Why should we need a… a _rule_ , now?”

Paran made a tired sound. “… You’re clawing, Yamame.”

“What?”

“My back – you’re clawing it.”

Yamame forced her fingers to splay. “… I wasn’t.”

“And,” Paran went on, “when I touched you – you were as taut as a bowstring.”

“I _didn’t bite!_ ” Yamame insisted. “It can’t be helped; it’s… instincts. I was fine, yesterday – after a while. Weren’t you the one who said, ‘we can never fully escape our natures?’ Well, I can’t – but I am trying. I want to _keep_ trying, and I want to touch you. So there. I don’t want to quit; I just…”

“Need to get used to it?” asked her human.

“… Need to get used to it,” gave up the earth spider. “Yes. Need to… get used to it.” _Stepped right on the sticky one, Yamame,_ she criticised herself inside. “Very good,” she sighed at her human. “Very good, Paran. Let’s get used to it. What rule did you say that was, again?”

“Something simple?”

“Simple is very good.”

Paran nodded – simply. “Then,” he said, “why don’t we try for… in the morning?”

“Morning sounds good,” agreed Yamame.

“And in the evening?”

“That’s good as well. So,” she summed up. “Morning and evening, then.”

“Yes,” he confirmed, “every morning, and every evening.”

“All right – _every_ morning and _every_ evening.”

“Until…” her human began.

“‘Until?’”

“… Until,” he said, looking straight into her spider eyes, “we can do it – without you going into paroxysms… Yamame.”

And it was then that the snub caught.

And the tension, which Yamame Kurodani had endured since joining her human on her sofa, snapped not unlike a thread – as tensions and threads snap both, when too fat a fly (or any such noisy interruption) chooses to land. Yamame Kurodani, mother of plagues, the yearly malady, felt her towering pride sway just a little bit, even as she met the one attempting to tip it with a forehead rivalling the most crinkled of shirts.

“Really?! Really!” A note higher, and she would have been squeaking. “Honestly? Seriously – for real?! Have you _just_ done this to me? No, wait. Wait, wait, wait. Hold on. Was that why… _That’s_ why you were upset in the morning – because I didn’t realise you _wanted_ to lose our bet? So then you could… So that I’d have to let you…”

Paran was smiling. “That’s about it, yes.”

“Are you even real?! That’s stupid! You’re stupid!”

“I told you, Yamame,” said the human – and it was as though victory itself was speaking. “I told you. That I’d be ‘very annoying’ starting today. Thrice, now. Well,” he breathed. “ _Here I am._ Good evening.”

And then, clearly in an advance of his promise, he grabbed her shoulders, and kissed her.

* * *

It _had not_ been evening.

Not close; an entire dinner (and washing-up after, and a deal of ineffectual flailing before) had been squeezed into the timetable, and still hours remained in the day. Now, however, evening was in full and undeniable swing (or the swing of the clock’s arms anyway), and Yamame Kurodani found its minutes filtering pleasantly through her mind’s internal web.

Not _altogether_ ; but, when her sole complaint was her human’s breath disturbing her still-undone hair every few seconds, Yamame Kurodani was willing toward concessions.

It was the most amazing thing.

No, not Yamame’s hairs _not_ standing on the ends at being so tickled; nor even her permittance of this tickling made such an appraisal justified. What did, was the human’s decision to do so. A braver soul may venture: his own permittance. His _trust._

And permit he had – and more. Yamame had had but to wash up after their meal, and miracles had come together; and she had discovered her human again on her sofa, seated comfortably, once her agreed part of the chores had been done. The human been the most absorbed, spinning the comb Yamame had left there in the morning between his clumsy human fingers; still when its owner had approached, the little tortoise-shell artefact from Yamame’s personal vaults had been put aside.

And then, working yet another miracle into the day, the human had opened out his arms, and, never speaking a spell, invited Yamame to fill in the vacancy.

Maybe _being offered_ to be so trusted had won over her spider heart; maybe a deeper need of her being was satisfied by wrapping her arms and legs around something which she now, on some level, knew had a value beyond the obvious pragmatic. All which Yamame could do – all which she could think she could do – had been to accept with a grin that, she hoped, had spoken of gratitude louder than simplicity.

Yamame’s human – once more displaying a kind of spatial dexterity which Yamame would not have suspected in his species – had accommodated her very well: he nudged his nose and mouth into the gap between Yamame’s chin and left shoulder, which in turn allowed said chin to rather snugly come to rest against the human’s own shoulder. An effort of symmetry and consideration, which Yamame’s architect mind could at once see and treasure – even if her heart had not already been doing so itself in its cage.

It had not been until a few moments, then a full minute later, that aforesaid concessions about hair had had to be made. Now, an unknowable time of conceding behind her, Yamame Kurodani resolved that – no matter how “amazing” she looked when she had it down – the hair had to be re-leashed, and soon.

But with this first sullen realisation, others came in following; and Yamame Kurodani’s heart clinched once the next in line had fully appeared.

At a great risk, she had to talk with her human about tomorrow.

Angles at which she might hang the issue were but two – yet either had kinks in it which made her choice agonised. The human may very good start for the priestess Hijiri with the project as soon as the morning – or, he may be persuaded to stay with Yamame for _just one more day_ and see to their new compact; but, while her heart was glad declaring the latter as the only proper course, Yamame’s heart was stupid, and had had to be questioned. The Komeiji girl’s investigation, the irritable natures of Yamame’s siblings which said investigation was like to... well, _irritate,_ to boot with Yamame’s own status as an elder of her kin – these told her in no happy words her involvement in the case could not be walled off with a simple, “I didn’t.”

The brutal truth was, Yamame Kurodani wanted nothing more intensely than for her human to stay and be her cushion all day long. But, where blood and blame were being merrily spilt from hand to hand, upholstery of all kinds was liable to stain.

( ) The cushion had to go.  
( ) It would make like a cushion and stay.


	15. Chapter 15

(X) The cushion had to go.

But Yamame Kurodani had been to parties enough; she knew where expensive coverings were best stored: in the next town over. But for the Underworld’s glowing capital no towns were available, however – and this one was no place for Yamame’s cushions. The Human Village, then – farther, and numinous though it was to Yamame – would best store her favourite. Yes, the Human Village had to do.

All of this was, of course, giddiness speaking; the human would store himself soon or late, even if Yamame said nothing and did less. All the same it allowed the Underworld’s architect purpose: enough purpose to screw up her courage, and gently dismantle the perfect arrangement she had been given inside her human’s arms.

“Paran?” The spider’s voice, surprising herself, turned out as little beyond a spider’s whisper. “We need to… talk. Yes. About something. Are you awake?”

The human’s responding sigh swept along the skin of her neck – and through her hair. Yamame’s shoulders flexed all on their own – then came again to a quiet rest, even as her human retracted his breath for a proper reply.

“… Can it wait?” he asked. “I’m in an amazing place right now.”

An unwitting giggle pushed out of Yamame’s chest. “My neck is an amazing place?”

“Mm.”

Another giggle followed at that. “That makes the second time, you know?”

Paran’s head moved as though to give a questioning tilt. “… Of what?”

“You,” said Yamame. “Complimenting me. Isn’t it? This morning,” she reminded, “you told me I looked… _amazing,_ right? With my hair let down. Now, my neck as well. That makes two, right? Or was that one just an extension?”

Her human made a rumbling sound. “But I’ve—” Then, his voice broke off. “… I’ll try to do it more often from now on,” he gave at length. “Gods know you’ve merited a compliment or two – or, well, more. Will have to put in more effort, I guess.”

But Yamame was clever enough to know there was more to this clumsy attempt at humour than a clumsy attempt at humour. “All right,” she said. “What is it I’m misunderstanding _this_ time?”

Paran brushed the question off. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing I can’t work out.”

“And you are sure of this?”

“Yes,” Paran said, firmly. “Sure.”

“All right, then,” Yamame allowed. “Work it out, Paran.”

“Very good,” said her human. “… Yamame?”

“Yes?”

“… You look amazing with your hair down.”

“We knew that already, didn’t we?” chuckled Yamame. “Though it’s a little inconvenient.”

“Your neck feels amazing as well.”

“That, there – that is a little more difficult to believe,” Yamame said. “Also something we had found out already. Am I really so short on good sides? Only my hair and my neck? That’s a little poor, isn’t it? My sewing’s pretty good, too – you know?”

“… Yamame?”

“Yes, Paran?”

The human beneath her swelled up with a breath that all but lifted Yamame a full hand-span. “I,” began her human, “I have wanted… have _always_ wanted… to _hold you_ – like this.”

Yamame Kurodani’s heart stopped.

When it shuddered into life again, it could have been hours later – or minutes, or less than minutes, or the clock beyond her bedroom’s door was a traitorous clock, and had modified its ticking to belie the ticking of Yamame’s own spider heart. Whichever of these was to the right, Yamame Kurodani was miserably all left – left dumbstruck and picking at the threads of her wits; most embarrassingly, Yamame Kurodani was left hoping, for the first time, that her human’s dull human senses would _not_ detect just how far left she was.

Something else was telling either way. Yamame, muttering, told her arms to relax.

“… That’s not a compliment,” she accused, once her voice had returned from its trip to the left field. “Thank you, really – but it wasn’t, you know? And there was that word, again – ‘always?’ That’s not what I remember. At all.”

“… Going to have to work out harder,” Paran issued his surrender – a strained surrender, but one all the same.

There was a pause that issued, too; and though only one of these had been meant for her merit (at least so far as guessing stitched), still Yamame seized on both. As good she did; for then, sighing, her human cracked the pause and resumed negotiations of his promise.

“Very good,” he said. “Very good, Yamame… but I don’t _mind_ this anyway.”

“Mind what, exactly?”

Paran _shifted_ – as though the simple motion conveyed exactly everything.

“… This,” he explained finally. “I don’t mind this.”

Or, non-explained. Yamame smiled despite herself.

“This, being holding me?” she asked. “That is also hard to swallow, you know? Considering.”

“I did offer,” her human pointed out. “I offered, and I _had_ offered, in the morning… obliquely.”

“That you did,” Yamame agreed. “… Obliquely.”

Minute by minute, it seemed more as if she had left her genius mind back at her drawing table. The cause did not escape her. More pertinently, the cause _could not_ escape her, so long as Yamame Kurodani kept her arms closed. The thought was comforting (somehow); and with reassured control (of the cause, if not her own feelings), the most skilled of Underworld’s spinstresses spun on toward the understanding which she now (late as centuries) realised both she and her human had been awkwardly spinning around one another throughout the last minutes.

 _You’re stupid,_ she thought at her human; but what she said was, “Want to keep doing this as well, then?”

 _No, you’re stupid,_ Paran thought back (or Yamame was certain he had); but he returned, “I want to, as well.”

And like that, it was done.

 _Another catch,_ Yamame marvelled inside. _Another compact between earth spider and human._ Had trust been a game, they would have been breaking records.

But trust was no game; and Yamame, turned out, was no breaker of records, but of promises. Almost a breaker of embraces in addition; but by now this peculiar game was familiar to Paran, and the human – once Yamame had but begun to push – loosed what already soft hold he had on the agitating earth spider.

Agitating, and looking the part likewise – which Yamame confirmed positively as soon as she ran a smoothing hand down her golden hair. Paran, for his human’s part, gave the earth spider fussing on his lap a look of his own. The look was concerned. At the same time, the look was amused; it was a wonder of superposition which – had Yamame not been agitated _and_ looking it – she would have quizzed on realms of possibility.

“All right, no!” the spinstress growled, gathering up tails of her hair. “That’s enough. No more! I’m tying it back up. Now! I don’t care if I’m amazing anymore!”

Paran was visibly jousting with a smile. “What’s that?”

Yamame scrunched up her brows. “Hair!” she hissed. “Hair! Which you’ve been _blowing up_ for the last… oh, _however_ long! I’m a spider! Can you imagine how aggravating that gets? When you breathe and breathe into my hair like that?”

“Not really.”

“Very!” Yamame snapped. “Very, _very_ aggravating! Should we let yours grow out, so I can blow in it for hours and hours? See how long before you tear?”

“We weren’t that—” Paran began to protest. Then, Paran’s first idea was shoved out of whichever vent in his head produced no voice; instead, a second idea took over behind his eyes. “Actually,” said this idea (or Paran did for it). “Might be able to do something about that.”

“Oh?” Yamame’s curiosity took the fore for a moment. “What’s that?”

“Something for your hair,” her human explained. “When I was going up last time, I said I would find you something nice. Yes? I did. Turned out, it was something for your hair. Still is, more like than not – somewhere in my bags. We could go get it. That is, if you’ll want to get off of me for a bit.”

Yamame didn’t. “ _Now_ you remember this?” she said, her previous frown triumphantly returned. “After all this time? Took you a pretty while.”

“Yes, _pretty,_ ” her human murmured under his nose. Then, he made a shrug. “Someone distracted me, Yamame.”

“Who? I’ll bite them.”

Had accusation ever had a name, it was “Paran.”

“… You,” said Paran, with double the force of his name. “You did, Yamame – for a _pretty while._ ”

“… Oh,” said Yamame, and it seemed something else was taking on her name as well. A blush – of the stripe which didn’t fear visiting itself even upon the deadliest of earth spiders. “Um… Oh.”

 _May bite that one, for good measure,_ she decided. But, as she grudgingly climbed down from Paran’s lap – the human’s, not the accusation’s – the only thing squeezed between her teeth was her own lip.

Someone else was being distracted.

* * *

The room had smelled like him.

It was a perplexing thought: perplexing, odd, and not a little late, and one Yamame Kurodani had taken as far as her bed in the end. The room where Paran had now been staying and sleeping for months had taken on his smell; logically, nothing about this had registered in Yamame’s mind as wrong. That it _had_ registered had been less logical. Maybe the hours spent in immediacy to her human had made the similarity more striking; maybe Yamame’s mind had never threaded it with any importance because it _had not been_ important before. The perplexing thought remained: that the heart of Yamame’s home had been co-opted, and with her full approval.

Once, this room had been everything which Yamame _could_ call home.

At one time, one too long to count – when the Underworld had been younger, and Yamame Kurodani had been younger still – a foursquare space, one such as this, hewed from aromatic mountain pines and tiled over with mats-of-straw shamefully abducted from nearby human dwellings, had been all inside which Yamame Kurodani may sleep away her nights. A spider may extend its net wherever in the crown of a tree and live; since Yamame’s run-in with those frangible creatures known as “humans,” however, her spider’s mind had nursed an exuberant craving for walls and floorings, ceilings and doors, and pine-wood panels filled out with straw-mats. Yamame Kurodani had indulged those new needs, and found them closer and closer her heart as work on her cottage nearby the Underworld’s outlets drew to completion.

It had been in the same cottage which the Oni had found her, decades afterwards. The straw-mats had softened in the meanwhile, and the wood walls had grown mouldy and old; still, with her spider’s craft, wiles, and not a trivial amount of cheating magic, Yamame had kept her first home in a habitable state. Nowhere yet as spacious as her current home was (certainly nowhere so tidy, either), Yamame had nonetheless added to her house across the years, spinning whichever material was procurable, and in whatever way her whimsy swung; her spider’s eye and mind seemed to weave through the geometric of raising walls and ceilings as easily as it threaded the octagons of a web. Almost, and Yamame would have been satisfied with this selfish creation alone.

Then, the war had happened. At once at her doorstep, but miles below the layers of black basalt stone as well as her attention; at its close, it was still the disease-weaving spider to whom the Oni had turned in their desperation, to carve them a new home from the destruction their rage had left in its wake.

Yamame Kurodani had given them all she had, and grew from it.

And yet, at the tail of the new Capital’s first decennary, it was its very architect whom the glowing jewel of the Underworld had left with the greatest hunger. Appetite whetted to soreness, wits eaten away by the Oni’s interminable celebration of existence, Yamame Kurodani – now styled builder of the Underworld - had gathered up her tools, hitched up her skirts, and – with a tow-cart of treasure accorded to her by the grateful underfolk squeaking behind her the entire way – journeyed back to her little cottage in Old Hell’s upper reaches.

Across the next years, Yamame Kurodani would continue taking assignments in the Capital under the age-faded eye of the Oni Nikuyama; in return, more treasure, items and material were awarded to the earth spider, dredged up from the once-extravagant ruins of Yamas’ homes which yet remained. When enough of those had been gathered, when crates of plaster and stacks of wood and bricks had been stacked high enough under the vaulted walls of the cave which housed Yamame’s cottage – it was then that the great architect had allowed her desires to cast back upon herself.

And so, drawing on the indignation which she would never have confessed had festered on the underside of her heart, as well as the memories of first raising a home in the human-fashion, Yamame Kurodani, quite single-handedly, had lain the foundations of her new home, which stood even now nearby the Underworld’s outlets. Only this room had been spared the need of repurposing and recycling. Only this one room – not even in its entirety – with its mouldy straw-mat floors and panelled walls, had been worked into the heart of the otherwise brick, mortar and plaster shell of her new home.

Yamame Kurodani was a nostalgic creature like that at times.

This was why, helped no further by the delay with which it had come, the thought that the old heart of her home had been _taken over by someone else_ was perplexing to say the least. An embarrassing parallel had not been lost on Yamame as she had leaned on the door-frame, and watched her human search his bags for his over-late offering.

Paran’s gift had turned out “something for her hair” indeed: a bright golden ribbon – a yard or so in length, four fingers across – and of a fashion which had made Yamame squeal in delight as she rushed forward to examine it. The thrice-folded core of the ribbon had been cut from the same fabric the lining of the wheat-gold dress – the one layered over with fish-scale, that Ashi had named the price for her advice – had been; from end to end, pearl-white lace of a web-like design had been painstakingly sewn on, folded-over, and sewn on again. The design had at once appealed to something inside Yamame’s aesthetic sense, and awoke an ember of jealousy in the pit of her stomach she would have thought impossible to wake at this point.

Paran had laughed when she had carefully felt the stitching with her lips. Yamame had stuck out her tongue at him in reply.

That a human’s creations could still make her jealous had honestly been a little scary; still, as she’d sat cross-legged on the floor and mothered her disordered hair, scarier things yet came back to haunt her.

Yamame had still to tell her human to leave with the project soon.

So she had. Told him, as simply and painlessly as she could.

Paran’s eyes had narrowed; and there, bubbling out from invisible holes and drying into a hard carapace over all, was the staid human Paran whom Yamame Kurodani had known and depended on for well long months before… well, before she had come to know the side of Paran with welcoming arms and likeable eyes as well as dependability.

“You do not want me listening in,” this Paran had said. No complaint had marked his voice; only there was a silent request for confirmation of a suspicion made good on already. “You do not want me listening in on further talk of killings. Is that it?”

 _Yes,_ Yamame had thought. “… A little bit of that, a little bit of no,” she had said out loud. “I want to get to work. That is one thing. My sisters, too; the sooner we can put _their_ hands to work, rather than being riled by accusations – which I guarantee you aren’t true anyway – the better for me… and them. Them, principally. Komeiji’s brat knows I didn’t… _do_ anything. That entire family is snakes, but they’re officious snakes when it suits them; they’ll keep pestering me if my sisters call on me and my age for support, even if—”

“—If Yamame Kurodani herself has done no wrong,” Paran had finished. “Very good. I will go. Hijiri wished to display your work as well; this should smooth over offences, if they persist.”

“Yes. That’s what I’m weighing on. More or less. That is why…”

“I will go,” Paran had said, again, with a note of finality. “Will you show me the project, Yamame?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Now?”

“Now is fine, isn’t it?”

A brow had risen on Paran’s face. “No bargaining?”

Yamame had thought it over. “… One condition,” she had decided. “OK, Paran? Only one, I promise. Is that fine?”

“What is it?”

Yamame’s smile had been winning as she’d replied.

“No distractions, OK?”

None had been made, either. Paran had shown nothing else than complete dedication to Yamame’s explanations as she described the project to him in vocabulary the priestess Hijiri as well was like to understand. Nor had he displayed anything else but unerring accuracy next, when Yamame had quizzed him on which parts of the project she had said were grounds for arbitration, and which were entirely undiscussable; nor next, when he had theorised what doubts he thought their employer may raise in addition.

Afterwards, however, a period of distraction was very gracefully approved.

* * *

So then, did her bedroom conversely smell like her?

In more meanings and in more ways than one, that was the first thought Yamame Kurodani awoke to the following morning. It had to, to some degree; though experience had taught Yamame that one’s own smell was not easily discernible until well into extremity. The thought steamed on inside her head even as she rose to a sit on the edge of her bed; it steamed on as she extended that to a wobbly stand.

By the time she reached the her bedroom’s door, it was little more than a silly soup boiling over. It was not the extent of silliness for that day, but Yamame Kurodani determined she had best emulate her human and _not_ drink it until the full dish was done.

Yamame could not know it, but two more ingredients would be thrown into the pot before the day was out.

The first was as apparent as Yamame’s first shaky step into what was an already busy kitchen despite the hour.

Upon the kitchen table, a black stain on the tapestry of Yamame’s taste for bright decoration, legs dangling over the precipice, two carmine eyes sunken into the back of the human toasting slices of bread on the stove, was Hachiashi.

Yamame’s jet-haired sister was the first to register the arrival of the house’s mistress. The other earth spider’s gaze slid off of Paran’s back, and walked up and down the arrived Yamame.

“Nice. Mhm. Nice.” Ashi put forward the cryptic flattery that was her trademark never cracking a smile. Then, she did crack a smile as she took in the blanket thrown haphazardly over Yamame’s otherwise naked shoulders. “Very, very nice. Good day, Yams. How are we this morning? Slept well? Stayed a touch late last night? Yams, but your legs are as long as the floor! I would kill for those legs. Wouldn’t you?”

The last question had been directed sideways from the spider sisters. No answer came, but for Yamame’s cavernous yawning.

“Hello, Ashi,” the elder of the spinstresses murmured, kneading at her eyes. “Straight from the morning, mm?”

Ashi gave a shrug. “Not my thought, Yams. Snakes, as you’re fond of saying.”

“Mm. Snakes,” Yamame repeated, numbly. “… Paran? Are you leaving soon? That’s your bag, isn’t it?”

It was, stood by one of the chairs at the table; but Yamame’s favourite human – who could have been the first addition to Yamame’s kitchen at its inception and remained there ever since for all he looked like a piece of animate furniture – only rumbled his acknowledgement of his name being brought to bear.

“… Will leave a few for you,” he murmured, it seemed to nobody who merited being looked at as much as being murmured at. Then, rust all but flaking off his joints, he turned around to physically face the earth spiders. “… Yamame,” he named the more dishevelled one. “… Good morning.”

“Mhm,” Yamame replied. “Good morning, Paran.”

The human made as though to do something; but _something else_ caught in the corner of his eyes, and made them flick toward something other yet on the nearby table – or under it, or beyond it entirely. The eyes were soon on Yamame again, and the Underworld’s architect was wise enough to realise the thing which had the eyes so bothered was a question.

The trouble was, not even she was sure what kind.

( ) Nod.  
( ) Shake.


	16. Younger generation again

(X) Nod.

Nor _had_ she to know. Trust. Trust had ever been the mortar of relations; so as good it chanced Yamame Kurodani had been stacking trust as of late.

All the stranger then, that – once the Underworld’s builder had given her sleepiest nod in weeks – her favourite human looked rather more startled than trusted. Neither had Yamame Kurodani, earth spider though she was, meant for the nod to _be_ startling; but, it seemed as ephemeral as all other expressions of her human, soon that, as well, gave its place to something else. A decision? As like as anything; though his hands did twitch once in _in_ decision as Yamame’s human extended them out. Out – towards the exact spider who had given the nod.

 _Oh, right,_ Yamame had just the time to think before her shoulders were gently pushed down on on either side; and then, _There was something like that, wasn’t there?_ , when her human leaned down to level his eyes with hers.

There was little anything – thoughts, time, or ideas on what to do with it – in Yamame’s world between that moment and the moment in which her favourite human was once again, for the second day in a row, pressing his lips against her in open sight of a guest. Worse yet, this kiss around, Paran had clumsily missed _both_ of her cheeks. Where he had landed instead, had been square between them.

Yamame kept perfectly still. There _was_ a muted reply from her instincts, yes there was – but the human was doing nothing of note but kissing her. There was _no need_ to respond. It was normal. It would pass. The instincts frayed away.

All the same there must have been a reply from Yamame herself; for then, the spinstress felt the human pulling himself free. Not _saw_ – her eyes had shut close somewhere in those fleeing moments before; but when she opened them, Paran was as red as a brick, and covering his face in shame an arm’s stretch away.

Yamame wasn’t awake enough to secure anything above a frown. Her mouth ruffled into a pout. “… Why are _you_ getting embarrassed?”

Paran looked away. “I had not…” Then, groaning, he let the hand drop loose by his side. “I hadn’t thought it through,” he gave up. “It _is_ embarrassing – when it is not just us.”

“ _I’m_ not embarrassed,” Ashi put in edgeways from the table.

Yamame Kurodani, mother of plagues, shot her sister a venomous look. Ashi remained defiantly alive, but shut up. “… Are you leaving soon or are you not?” Yamame demanded again of her human. “Mind, I’m not throwing you out – I’m really, really not – but I did ask you a question. I’m not going to bite you or anything; I just want to know. The least you could do for me right now is spare me the guessing.”

“And more embarrassments,” Ashi chipped in.

“Shut up, Ashi.”

The younger spinstress sketched a shrug. “Yes, ma’am, Yams.”

The human Paran, who had made the best of the sisters’ verbal recreation to overcome the self-inflicted change of colour, righted his back. “Yes,” he said, all-Paran-like again. “I am leaving soon. I have eaten already; I’m only making these to take with. Well, and for you,” he added. “These are our last eggs.”

“Mm? Oh. Thought I’d smelt something good running out,” said Yamame, smiling at her own joke. “… Are they really?”

“More soon, if you do good.”

“If _you_ do good,” Yamame corrected. “That Hijiri has to be _someone_ , if she is building a bath-house with staying rooms. Not upstart priestry, I mean. More than likely she’s got connections she could shake down for eggs. Not that I’d know anything about that. Not half as good as you. That’s why _you’re_ going to be shaking _her_ down, right?”

“The priestess Hijiri holds some sway with the farmers, yes,” said Paran, very seriously. “I will ask about eggs.”

“Mhm. Very good.” Yamame made another yawn. Then, she noticed something else. “… Um. Paran?”

“Yes?”

“That toast is burning, you know?”

“Ack—”

As she watched her human hip around to pluck the egg-bathed toast from the jaws of carbonisation, Yamame Kurodani, mother of plagues, allowed her smile to wilt.

The human was leaving – again.

The news had not been ill-delivered – nor had it been news _at all_ ; but for all Yamame Kurodani counted down the hours until her next job, and for all she wished her human out of earshot once talk of his “spider-poisoned” kinsman was engaged, all the same the sense that circumstance had cheated her out of something was firmly stuck in a far corner of her mind’s web. _Maybe not circumstance,_ Yamame thought, watching her human fumble over the cooking equipment; maybe Yamame herself had been the cheater, to have brought human things – trust, compassion, Paran – into this game of…

… This game of what? _Youkai_ -hood? But could _youkai_ -hood be cheated?

Yamame Kurodani, _youkai_ since ages (or at least since Yamame remembered), breathed out her troubles in a hot sigh. This was pique speaking, nothing more. It was pique that she was being delayed. It was pique that she, Yamame Kurodani, would be required to wait until she may again bully her human into showing her more and more trust; it was pique that she, the yearly malady, was being overruled by something other than her own spider’s will.

It was pique that she was unlike to get her evening kiss as well as the morning one today.

Yamame shook her mussed-up head. “… Why, anyway?” she murmured, if for nothing else than to give her irritation an external vector to eat at. “Why are you always up so early? Why do you only sleep in when we are going out together?”

Atop the table, Ashi volunteered her own theory. “Simplicity, Yams,” she said, smiling a knowing smile. “Why, he knows you are going to come wake him up. So he waits.”

Sooner than Yamame could frame what she made of this answer, the human Paran himself wrenched away from the stove, stomped the few steps he had to table, and slammed a plate heavy under egg-infused toast down beside Yamame’s clever-mouthed sister. The human had not perceived it – could not have, with his poor human (if likeable) eyes – but to Yamame’s own spider eyes (and illimited amusement), Ashi had _actually jumped._

Then, in the same cloying tone Yamame had only ever heard on those occasions she had been really, really stupid, Paran addressed the younger earth spider – younger may be, but an earth spider still – directly and without reserve.

“Hachiashi,” he told her, saccharine dripping. “… Shut up. OK?”

And then, miracle of miracles, gods-sent under the earth, Yamame’s sister gave an almost meek nod.

“Ye—Yes,” she said. “… Yes, sir, Paran.”

* * *

“So, did you bite him?”

The question discharged from Ashi’s toast-and-egg-occupied mouth almost at once when Yamame had shuffled herself back to her kitchen, after seeing off her human at the house’s front door. It did not put her in a mind of clawing. Not least because Yamame Kurodani was in a mind of clawing already – whether at her face, hair, or whichever other irritant happened nearby her nails. Had been in it – ever since said door had closed behind her.

Though she was not about to claw in the earnest just yet; but, neither was she about to allow the criticism to fly free. Yamame drew up a chair. An inch short of folding down like a sheet of wet fabric, the eldest of Underworld’s spinstresses seated herself opposite of her sister. At the same time, she pulled in closer the toast-laden plate of which Hachiashi, in her elder’s absence, had used liberally and with dispatch.

“Why would I do that, now?” Yamame asked.

Ashi, giggling at the older spider’s naivete, pulled the plate right back. “Why, Yams,” she explained, snatching up another still-warm piece, “I didn’t hear a peep of struggle, and I didn’t sense anyone besides your genius self. That more or less leaves you and your overkeen teeth. And mind, sister mine – you _are_ wearing a face like someone you totally adored has just expired in a spectacular way.”

 _Am I?_ thought Yamame, at the same time touching a finger to her lips. The lips were curving down at the ends. “… He hasn’t,” she insisted, manually kneading out the kink. “He _won’t_ , either. This tunnel comes out straight to the surface, and he’s protected once up there. We’ve _done_ this before – you know?”

“Spent half an hour kissing good-bye?” Ashi blinked, mock-disbelievingly. “No way, Yams; you’d have bitten off your tongue. Or his. Gods above know which first.”

“What’s my _tongue_ have to do with anything?”

“See? Now I know you’re lying.”

Yamame didn’t counter anymore; only she bit into her own piece of toast and made a surly face. _I wasn’t,_ she thought, in like a surly corner of her mind, _And we didn’t. Not for half an hour._

Nor had they. Not at all. Only once had Yamame Kurodani given over a thought to matters which pertained otherwise than to work. Only after she had once more quizzed her human on the project’s musts-and-not-musts; only after she had given to him the details that had only stitched together in her sleep. Only afterwards had Yamame Kurodani permitted her selfishness to squeeze in a word of its own.

“… Hey.”

“Mm?” Paran had quit the impatient checking of his pockets crucial evidently before any length of travel. “What is it?”

“If,” Yamame had begun, “If you aren’t able… If it doesn’t _seem_ like you’re able to come back by the evening—”

“As like won’t,” the human had nimbly cut her off. “Why?”

 _… Then don’t go looking for another spider to kiss,_ Yamame had finished inside her head. “… Nothing much,” her mouth had offered up instead. “So, when? Tomorrow? After? I’ll try to have Ashi out by then. I promise.”

Her human had hung his shoulders, as though the joke had landed wrong. “… Can’t say. Hijiri besides, I may need to get in touch with a few sources. All of it hinges on how well-wised up our priestess is on what’s to be done. Materials may be easier to come by if we’ve Hijiri’s name at the bottom of the invoice, too. Gods watching, I know of a woodcarver recently broke his leg, who—”

“How long, Paran?”

Her human had sighed a long-suffering sigh, and the last pretences to diligence with it. “… Three days,” he had told the staring Yamame. “Give me three days. Gods watching, Hijiri will have understood by then, and that woodcarver won’t have thrown in with the celebrations with a leg in a cast.”

“Celebrations?” Yamame had cocked her head. “What kind of celebrations do woodcarvers have?”

“Wooden, no doubt.” Paran had smiled. “I didn’t mention? There’s a holy-day lurking somewhere about this week. Couldn’t tell you which day, but most people in town better informed than I. No worries; I won’t be joining in. My employer’s gods don’t do holy-days.”

“But I have no gods,” Yamame had protested.

“Thus, no holy-days.”

 _What about yours?_ Yamame had wondered inside, _Would yours give you a holy-day if you asked?_ But these questions never found a voice, nor an answer – only a quiet “Take care, OK?” when the human – named after his god – had once again opened up his arms for the god-lacking earth spider. Yamame had completed the last in a line of little blasphemies by pulling him down instead.

Then – a little more breathless, but no looser set in his duties than he had been the previous minute – the human had taken his blindfold, and fled.

“Are you done basking?”

Ashi’s arch question rethreaded Yamame to the toast-flavoured present. The younger spinstress, at once regaled by and annoyed with her elder sister’s distraction, was staring. Had been, if said annoyance was telling.

“… I wasn’t,” Yamame mumbled in her defence. “Only I’ve…”

“Oho?” Hachiashi’s carmine eyes needled on. “Only you’ve _what?_ ”

“Only,” said Yamame, “I was thinking. I’ve been nothing but stupid lately, you know?”

The younger earth spider made a sound lodged somewhere between a growl and a sigh. “Not _stupid,_ Yams,” she insisted. “ _Single-threaded._ There is a difference. When you tie yourself up for months for fear of changing that thread – that is when you are stupid. I know stupid, Yams – oh, I’ve _known it_ – and you are not it, you bleeding genius, you. So don’t work at it, please. I don’t want a stupid sister.”

Yamame shaped a wan smile. “… Thanks.”

Hachiashi’s reply was cunning. “There. See? That. That is the second I’ve seen you smile today – and you are usually less reserved about blow-drying your fangs. The first, incidentally, was just then. Maybe you should bask some more, Yams – and let my fangs take care of the food.”

“Must I be mocked straight from the morning, Ashi?” Yamame moaned. “I had an anxious night.”

“Mocked?” Ashi faked a gasp. “Who-ever is _mocking_ you, Yams? All I’m doing is teasing. I’ll have you know it is perfectly fine to bask. Whatever makes your pretty mug go happy, makes it go happy. There’s no shame in it; and if I really had to say something for myself, it would be that I’m not at all the one who started.”

“Started? Started what?”

“Teasing, Yams; pay attention.” Ashi tore off a chunk of her food before continuing, “Weren’t you, back there? I’m not blind; I _saw_ you nodding. Showing off your accomplishments in taming humans is fine, but some of us may react poorly to brazen displays of intimacy. I, for one, am a-seethe with envy. _A-seethe,_ Yams.”

Yamame knitted her brows. “Quit, Ashi. That’s not funny.”

“Why would it be?” Ashi replied, accurately rather calm than funny. “Truth seldom is. Amusing, perhaps; rarely funny. This is what you’ve been routinely forgetting about us, dear sister. We _don’t care._ I don’t know what self-effacing, backward, pity-ridden ideas the Oni have beaten into your pretty head. I don’t care. I’m an _earth spider._ I do what I do _because it is what I am._ There is nothing else more important than that. If I had a human I wanted nothing but to kiss all over, I would have spent way more than half an hour doing it. If I had such a skill for drawing pictures of buildings it was sought after even by those who otherwise claim to hate me, I would have exercised it. And if – by chance – I had an older sister who was so far, far above my planes of achievement I’d need another incarnation’s worth of patience and skill to match her and she still _kept rising,_ well…” Ashi’s mouth warped into a smirk. “I’d tease that sister, Yams. Gods above, I’d tease that sister _to pieces._ ”

“… Ashi,” Yamame choked out, “Are you… Are you _angry_ with me?”

“Angry?” Ashi laughed. “I’m not angry, you bleeding blond star of the Underworld. I’m envious. There’s a difference.”

The blond star felt herself attiring an un-starry pink. “… I’m sorry?”

“We’re family, Yams. I _love you._ I don’t want you to be sorry. I want _me_ to be _better._ ”

Almost, and Yamame Kurodani, the bleeding blond star of the Underworld, would have apologised again.

Almost, and the mother of plagues would have put forward yet another apology – another apology, and perhaps another word of encouragement to her sister who – unknowably to Yamame’s single-threaded mind – had apparently been nursing an illness to match Yamame’s deadliest contagions. Then, however, the younger Hachiashi once more proved to be the nimbler between the two spiders; and, as she did the remaining piece of toast which she had thrown up into the air and caught in her mouth on the fall, Yamame’s little sister swallowed down the grudge as well.

“Truth be told, Yams,” she spoke up, instantly picking up another slice, “I am relieved first of all. Mind, we are family, and I do love you to death; but you are skittisher than the skittishest humans I’ve had the privilege to watch skitter, and I was somewhat, just a _touch_ , worried.”

“Worried?” Yamame repeated. “Worried about what?”

“About _whom,_ Yams. Mostly, I was worried that you might have done it.”

The elder spider’s brain threatened to begin shutting down. “… Might have done _what?_ ”

A moment yet Hachiashi didn’t answer. Then she blew open, and out came a nasty snicker. “Would you believe Komeiji’s brat did the same thing to us? That girl, Yams; she is worse than her mother had ever been – and I’ve never even known her mother that good! Could you imagine she popped up banging on our door – almost banged a hole right through! – had us hunkered down in a circle on the carpet, glared us all over with those little grey eyes of hers, and in the end just went, ‘Well, did you?’ – like it was the most obvious thing we would? Yams, I thought I’d _croak._ Took us the best of the next quarter to wring out what she’d meant – though not before she’d already had a read of most of us. Maybe it was meant to _startle_ us into blundering something. I can’t pretend to fathom what that girl’s mental processes involve. Snakes, right? Mind-leeching snakes.”

“Well,” Yamame dared a tiny smile, “… did you, though?”

Ashi sniggered. “Very good, Yams – but no. The girls all said no. No kill, no sight. Nothing.”

“What did the Komeiji say?”

“The Komeiji brat, imagine,” Ashi huffed, “said she’d read nothing to the contrary. Whoever did do it, well, evidently it wasn’t one of ours. Maybe we don’t all while away our mornings kissing up with humans, Yams – but we’re all very well aware of the rules. None of us want trouble from on up. We’ve lived there. I’ve lived there. ‘Gods above’ are handy to invoke, but they are nowhere as pleasant to summon in actual.”

“I’ll believe,” agreed Yamame. “I’ve had… run-ins. With priestry more than gods, but…”

“That’s one thing,” Ashi nodded. “Another is… We would never have hurt you, Yams.”

“Me? I wasn’t hurt.”

“No, you weren’t; but there is something close to you – someone close – that might have been, if it had been us after all.”

“… Oh.” Yamame bit her lip. _There is one, isn’t there?_ “Um, right. Guess there is.”

“There is, Yams. I saw him myself, not too long ago. That’s why I marched myself up here as soon as morning today,” Ashi went on. “I was afraid— Well, no, not afraid. I was… _tactically concerned_ things might have gone over to the sour side. I’d said some careless things to you; I’d said some pushy things to him, and… Yams, don’t take me wrong; you’re a genius – but you’re a skittish genius, and that’s your own disease. Mind, I hadn’t assumed you’d put a proven informant out of misery over… well, the two of you alone know over what it could have been – but it made me think all the same. About human things. About skittish things. _Some_ tactical concern was warranted. Some.”

“… Mm.” Yamame had no recourse but to fall in again. _Nothing’s gone sour, though,_ she thought. _Nothing’s gone sour. Some things – even the opposite, if that’s the opposite of sour._ What did that say about tactics? “… That’s all there is, then?” she asked after a moment. “That’s everything why you’ve come – because you were concerned about me and him?”

“Can’t I?” Hachiashi’s big, carmine eyes almost glittered with faked tears. “Can’t I come call on my elder sister from time to time wanting a mercenary reason? Oh, boo, Yams – boo!”

 _Mercenary?_ “I didn’t say that, Ashi. I’m asking—”

“Asking if we shall spare you the responsibilities of leadership off of the build site,” Hachiashi chimed in. “No, Yams. We shan’t. The girls look up to you. I look up to you. We know a genius mind needs a wide swath of playing space to spread its wings, so we give you that space. We still love you, though. We especially love you when circumstance presents we may need you to put in a good word for us for when someone takes us for a scapegoat. It’s your age, Yams. It may come with kisses, but it also comes with expectations as well.”

“‘Kisses?’”

“Actually,” Ashi grinned, “now you’ve pointed it out, you’re right. Those are mostly your hair, not your age. It’s a very simple equation. You’ve the prettiest hair of us all, so you attract all the kisses.” The younger spinstress shrugged. “The age still stands, though.”

Yamame grimaced. “You’re mocking me again.”

“Teasing, Yams. Mocking is about flattering lies. Teasing is just embarrassing truths.”

Yamame groaned her exasperation into her toast.

Yet for all the exasperation Yamame Kurodani had had to groan, the reality leaned otherwise: that affairs with which she had been contending had now turned out healthier – or less sour – than her anxiety had had her switch and toss sleepless about in the night. Maybe Yamame, the yearly malady, had overappraised this malady in particular, and had chased her human out prematurely; on the other hand, maybe Yamame, the blond star of the Underworld, had done herself an unwitting service sending him off sooner rather than later – over the delays she knew likely in her heart they would have otherwise stretched until breaking point. Or Yamame would have, on her own. That, among recent uncertainties, was one out of the net.

Then, however, something made a _click_ in the star’s lazily flowing core, and Yamame’s brows crashed together above her nose like a pair of caterpillars who, all of nowhere, hated one another with a venomous passion.

“… Ashi? Say, here…”

The younger earth spider looked up from the plate of toast, which – by now – was near two-thirds cleaned. “Say what?”

Yamame breathed in. “Say. What was that you mentioned you’d said to him, again?”

“To whom? Paran?”

“Him.”

Hachiashi, who had by now scented out the approaching thread of interrogation, shrewdly narrowed her eyes. “I said I’d told him some pushy things, Yams. Which I did, too. Why-ever does my much-beloved sister ask?”

Yamame folded her arms on her chest. “I was under the impression,” she said, “that you and him weren’t on speaking terms.”

“That’s probably since I told him to tell you so, yes. He really did at that, huh.”

“Then the two of you have spoken?”

“We’ve more than spoken, Yams,” Ashi said, uncharacteristically drawing on a frown of her own. “We’ve _talked_. There were times you weren’t nearby, and _someone_ had to tell to him a sprinkling of important little truths which _someone else_ never had. About us, about the Underworld… About you, was the topic of most note. Then, I had him tell me some things about his side. Oh, _the things,_ Yams! The things he told me – _especially_ after I got him drunk that one time!…”

The caterpillars on Yamame’s face had now progressed to open war. “He _doesn’t drink,_ Ashi. I tried to get him to, once. He told me he didn’t – very firmly.”

“That is funny,” said Ashi; “logical he would tell you so, but funny – especially as I’ve a vivid image in my head of him tripping and tumbling all over these very chairs right here. A leg broke off, even. Was it his? Chair’s? Chair’s, I think. One of those, anyway.”

Yamame Kurodani did her damnedest as _not_ to glance sideways at the one chair she knew very good had now for a while suffered from one mysteriously wobbly leg. “… Why?” she muttered. “Why is it that neither of you has thought it meet to clue me in until now? Why was I being excluded?”

Hachiashi’s eyes all but began to glow self-satisfaction. “Ah, now there is something _precious!_ Are you actually being _jealous_ now, Yams? Good! Good, sister! Hold on to that feeling. Wrap it up! Imagine, next time you make for a rush start, or overnight on site hounding over those pesky last-minute details, I may be back down here, pretty dress on me, drinking your human under the table. Wouldn’t that be a sight?”

“Ashi…”

“Of course, I’d much rather you were doing that, Yams,” Ashi continued, smiling an angelic little smile whose innocence reached no further than the edges of her colourless lips. “See, for all that I appreciate what he does, I don’t think I _like_ Paran. He is big, clumsy, stubborn yet indecisive, and arrests _entirely_ too much attention of one of my sisters, whom I sometimes – just sometimes, nothing selfish – want to have to fawn over all by myself.”

Yamame Kurodani, star of the Underworld, began to feel an eclipse oncoming.

 _Mercenary._ The word had not been an accident. It had been _a hint._

“Ashi?” Yamame murmured, palming her face not unlike her human had been, a little over half an hour before, in the same room and not a much dissimilar spot. “Say, here…”

“What’s up?” Ashi leaned forward, giddy all over. “What is it, Yams?”

“… Would you like to stay for today?”

The younger spinstress clapped her hands together in delight. The sound was a dry branch snapping above a web. “Yams, that is wonderful!” Hachiashi was squealing. “Of course I’ll stay. Thank you; oh, thank you! What are we doing to do? Anything is fun with you.”

“… We could look over our upcoming project,” Yamame speculated, more by sheer force of momentum than that of any remaining willpower. “Someone would have to do it with you, sooner or later. We could also start finally tearing down those dresses. I’ve been forgetting about those.”

Ashi clapped again. “Anything’s fun with you, Yams – even if it’s terribly boring stuff. Can we gossip, too? We younger earth spiders do love to gossip, you know.”

“… Ashi?” Yamame groaned. “One question, before all.”

“Shoot, Yams.”

“What _else_ aren’t you telling me?”

“Mm. Hmm.” The younger spider touched a musing finger to her cheek. “There was that one thing. See, there was a certain silly-named ‘Hachiashi’ on the board for house-wide laundry today. Imagine that! Not sure how it’s relevant, but here it is. Something I wasn’t telling you.”

Yamame Kurodani, she who had seen Old Hell destroyed and built again, now abruptly found herself wanting to cry at each and every snake and cheat who demonstrably constituted her inner circle.

Instead, she began to laugh, and laughed, until her belly hurt.

* * *


	17. Chapter 17

Yamame Kurodani, the blond star of the Underworld, passed the following three days inside a nebula of productivity.

At her sister’s side, and with said sister’s commentary on nothing and everything lavished preciously on every hour, Yamame had spent the first day picking and pulling lengths of thread out of another spinstress’s lifework. Though Ashi’s fingers had proven a match for her mouth and no mistake; and, at the end of the day, all sizes of squares and wedges of colourful fabrics ready for repurposing had been stacked in neat stacks atop Yamame’s work-desk. Gossip as well – though this thankfully took up no already scarce physical space.

At her sister’s request (or niggling, depending on who was asked), Yamame Kurodani had given the morning of the second day to nursing a cup of tea and poring over a letter to the Underworld’s housebound vicereine. Satori Komeiji had never featured much in Yamame’s faraway corner of the realm – nor were those few instances she _had_ an especially fond memory for the great architect; still, the opportunity presented to communicate with the eldest Komeiji wanting the slatternly-robed governess worming through her thoughts, Yamame had found her natural humour furtively swaying her pen. “My dearest Satori,” Yamame had written – before throwing the parchment bashfully to the side. Then, the next sheet, “Hail, exalted Komeiji” had somewise come out to balance, and Yamame had thrown again.

In the end an honest (if simple), “dear lady Satori” had to do; and Yamame had at last proceeded to relate the late incident in detail which the aspirant youngest Komeiji, in her enthusiasm, might inadvertently have forgotten. Then, her own family name described below the paragraphs in fat, ostentatious runes – half in mockery and half in imitation of priestess Hijiri’s message – Yamame Kurodani had folded up her letter, capped off her tea, and made for Old Hell’s shining Capital.

The Oni Nikuyama had as always brought his arbiter’s resources to work in his lighthouse, and had sworn to get the letter in the hands of someone who, ultimately, would convey it the long way to Satori Komeiji’s bed-stand. This solemn oath delivered, the red giant had brought out his beloved tea urn; and Yamame, who had entirely expected such a bringing-out and had packed her own tea-box, whiled away the remainder of the afternoon in harrumphing company of an old friend.

The third day, Yamame Kurodani had handed in full over to her hobbies. Sooner than the day had been fully out, the greatest of the Underworld’s spinstresses had begun another work yet. Sooner than evening had described on her clock’s seemingly hurrying face, Yamame had traced the scraps retrieved two days before on thin sheets of lambskin with a piece of lead, broadcast the so-made stencils all across her desk, and out of the organised chaos which marked every trained mind’s working space, Yamame had begun to spin her newest piece.

Sooner than sleep had at last dragged her away to bed, a dress-like creation – held together for the moment with a host of colour-coded pins – had been hung up proudly in her bedroom’s garderobe.

So it was with some distracted surprise, that Yamame walked out of her bedroom on the fourth morning to find her favourite human returned.

Though “returned” may be yet a stretch when the human lay asleep, spread devil-may-care from end to end of Yamame’s sofa; all the same Yamame, the star of the Underworld, could not – and would not – fight against the bright smile that tugged at her lips when she smelt the scents of washing soaps and fresh skin hanging in a cloud over her human. Paran must have _been returned_ for a while – or long enough anyway to shower and change into the gorgeous bathrobe Yamame had sewn for him for just such occasions. Why here, though? Why had he not gone back to his room, where a comfortable _futon_ was ever ready for use? No gods were telling.

These idle questions were anyway walked away into the unknown when Yamame knelt on the floor beside the sofa and her carelessly sleeping human. Sudden, or merely unnoticed before; another thought had now snaked into the emptied space. A simple thought, which somehow brought back to mind their bittersweet good-bye from days before, and jerked Yamame’s smile.

She wanted to tie him up.

No _why_ or _how_ had declared itself. Only this simple craving, not unfamiliar to her spider’s heart.

Yamame really, _really_ wanted to tie him up.

( ) Tie him up.  
( ) No tying up.

* * *

(X) Tie him up.

And tie the spider spinstress would.

The ribbon, brought from Yamame’s bedroom to assist in morning hair rituals, had now found unexpected new employ. Had the mother of plagues not been mired in other diversions, other – more appropriate – tools may have been spun for the occasion; now, the ribbon – in a turn of irony, her human’s own gift – had to serve.

Nor would it serve badly; it slid easily enough under the sleeping human’s arms, and coiled nicely around his wrists. Twice, and thrice, and once again, the golden strip of fabric went and joined the two surprisingly hefty arms together at the outermost joint. Made to hold the wealth of Yamame’s hair, and then to stick out still (some of Yamame’s sisters said, in the likeness of a specially reckless butterfly), there even remained enough of the ribbon to tie into a pretty knot. Yamame stood up, swung a leg over her human, and – to secure a better angle – quietly sat astride him.

But Yamame Kurodani, grapple though she had with many troubling realities and won already, had still to face another: that the Underworld’s great architect, smaller though she were than her favourite human, even in this form had still an abundance of limbs and assorted body parts hanging from her airy spider’s heart. That a creature such as she, even if _still_ not as heavy as some others she knew, had a weight to mind all the same.

That, this weight saddled out of nowhere on his lower body, her human was certain to notice something was wrong.

What was, of course, was Yamame; and the human did notice: gasped at first something about eggs, and strained at his hastily tightened binds. Then, with difficulty, his eyes inched open; and there, in those lovable, lovable eyes, mounting as quick as Yamame had mounted him moments before, was…

… Panic.

Too quick, and no mistake. Yamame had but thought to retract her fingers when her human once more strained violently at the ribbon tying his wrists together. Then, bent at the elbows, Paran whipped his arms back…

… And _smashed_ the conjoined fists into the side of Yamame’s skull.

Yamame Kurodani had been hit before.

Never mind she worked on build sites, where bricks and bags of plaster flew from one pair of arms to another as ready as the insults which followed any failed pass; Yamame Kurodani had raised – and been raised in – a city of Oni. No amount of time spent nearby the Oni was a largely sober one; and no amount of drink could ever damp the belligerent underlining the horned folk had worn and patched for millennia. Yamame Kurodani had been hit before; and if she had to grade this latest hit against being rough-handled by a sake-soaked Oni, trounced by an overbearing Hakurei shrine maiden, or clawed at by an earth spider who had somehow missed a very straight pass, it was nothing to bite over.

So Yamame Kurodani did not bite. Though she did gnash her teeth until enamel squeaked; but she did not bite – and it was an enormous victory.

But whoever was winning, Paran was not he; and Yamame’s human – having furiously blinked away the previous one – now had an entirely new panic settling in behind his (how were they still?) lovable eyes.

“Yama—” He choked, even as his arms flaked and collapsed across his chest. “… Yamame?”

Yamame opened her mouth, but all which made out of her clinched throat was a rattling noise. The spinstress spun it into a groan, before the human could sense her… well, whatever it was he sensed in her. “… I am here,” she said, and her voice was a needle scraping on a fingernail. “I am here,” she said again, and this time it was only scraping on a thimble. “… Hello.”

“… Hey,” Paran replied.

“Welcome back,” Yamame scraped on.

“… I am back,” Paran agreed.

A butterfly made of silence wriggled in between them, likely landed on the flowery cockade binding the human’s wrists.

At its end, Paran wriggled it off.

“… Yamame,” he said, shifting under her uncomfortably. “… I did not _mean_ to do that.”

“I know,” said Yamame.

“I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

“I am a nervous sleeper.”

“I know,” Yamame said once again. _Whom to blame it on, too,_ she added in her head.

“… I’m so sorry,” Paran delivered his final argument.

Yamame squeezed her amber eyes shut. _I know that, as well,_ she thought.

But if her human had in his journeys to and from the Underworld come again across the Komeiji, and somewise absorbed their gift, Yamame’s ultimate “I know” did not satisfy him. “I will make this up to you,” he insisted, shifting again. “Anything you’d like, Yamame. I promise.”

Yamame felt weird. At once she did not want to bite him. At the same time, she really, _really_ wanted to bend down and sink her fangs in. Not as _punishment_ in any form; but she had heard this promise before, and it set her heart stinging.

“… That’d make two,” she sighed. “I may be a silly earth spider, but I remember what you promise me. That’d make two favours you owe me now.”

“Or one bigger one,” Paran told her. “Well?”

“Those combine?” _How? Which way?_ Yamame did not know anymore.

As her human’s had before, now Yamame’s eyes were rasping open; soon, and she was once more looking down on her pinned human. Something that – had she been but a second before – may have been a smile swiftly evacuated Paran’s face. All at once, she was reminded one more time of the teethier alternative to talk.

At length, however, anger seeping out together with the sweat on her exposed arms, Yamame shook her still-undone hair left and right.

“Very good, Paran,” she gave up. “Very good. I want you to report. Is that a big or a small one? Hmm? I’m not up to speed. I can sew a robe to make an Oni look like a statesman, but I’ve never taken favours in return. It’s a bit of a first.”

Paran made a nod – denying nothing and confirming less. “I will report, Yamame,” he assured her, as straight-laced as his best shoes. “Anything else?”

 _A small one, then,_ Yamame reasoned out. _As my work would be. Go figure._

( ) Anything else, Yamame?

* * *

(X) ???

But moods came and went, and then were relevant no more. So too did Yamame’s.

Would that she were as quick at these talks as she was at the drawing table. Then, Yamame could have reached farther ideas than what was on hand – or under hand – or under Yamame, as it were. But she was not. So, drawing upon what _was_ there – as well as her hair behind her ear, and a spidery smile onto her lips – the blond star of the Underworld asked her human:

“Would you like to tie me up, instead?”

Yamame’s human, for all he had been pinned under an earth spider for a well good bit now (technically since waking up), batted his eyes close and open again as though the spider had only begun pinning in earnest with those words.

“… Were you asking,” he coughed up at last – and the words were somehow something returning, “… Or were you ordering, Yamame?”

The mother of plagues, Yamame Kurodani, puffed up her cheeks viciously. That it was with pique, rather than some black contagion, only spoke of how much she was ready to restrain herself for her human. “Are we playing that again?” she huffed. “Are we, really? I don’t want to. I don’t want to order you. I’ll order you very good when it is on our work, thank you very much in advance. Outside of that, I… I don’t want to. And that’s final.” Yamame knew she would regret this “final” sooner than it made fully out of her mouth; still, with what authority remained from her topmost position, she rounded it off, “So no. I’m not ordering, Paran. Wiggle out of this however you like, but I’m not giving you that way. I want… I _need_ an envoy and a house-minder. Those two. I don’t need a pet to boot. I’m no Komeiji.”

“… Asking, then,” her human concluded. “Why?”

Yamame shrugged – and her hair somewise slid free again. “… I don’t know,” she confessed, looping it behind an ear again. “Only I’d thought… Or _hadn’t_ thought about it. It’s just something I… Something I just _felt like asking,_ I guess. I let slide your human quirks. Why can’t you let slide mine? I have those too, you know.”

“This?” asked Paran, prodding his chin out at his restrained arms.

“… Something like that, yes,” admitted Yamame. “I wasn’t going to eat you. Or hurt you. Or scare you. Or anything, really; I’m an earth spider, yes – but I’m also more. I just… wanted to tie you up. I really, really wanted to tie you up. That’s all.”

 _That really is all,_ she said again in a gloomy corner of her head, even as her human shut his eyes and exhaled a long and heavy breath into the sticky air between them. Then, some kind of decision forging, Paran looked up at her again.

“… Yamame,” he said, “I will do you any favour you would like. Ahead of that, however, there is something you should – might want to – hear. I have made a decision.”

 _I saw,_ thought Yamame; but to humour her human’s quirks (oh how she humoured those), she volunteered, “What kind?”

“That I would lie less,” said Paran. “Maybe it is late, yes,” he immediately conceded; “but I have had some time to think calmly across the last few days, and I remembered some lies that had been… well, rendered somewhat pointless. I hadn’t entirely meant them to, but I had to consider maybe it was time to throw them out.”

“What brought that on?”

Paran sighed; then, mouth twisting dramatically, he wrenched his head left and right. “A certain earth spider had begun to explore, Yamame,” he grunted. “Worse, for I had kept her out of trouble for months before. Worse yet, I then let her bully me into assisting. Worst of all, however, I found out I _wanted_ to assist her. It was like a landslide from there. Imagine me tumbling.”

Somehow, by an effort of will, Yamame kept her lips from curling up. “That makes you easy prey though, you know?”

“As well I am,” her human surrendered. “Maybe even easier. Maybe I _had always_ wanted to help her explore. Maybe I’d only been lying I hadn’t. To her, and to myself.”

“That _would_ make you easier,” Yamame agreed.

“And her, a lazy hunter,” Paran countered. “Going for such easy prey and all. _Oof._ ”

Yamame Kurodani retracted her hand after the punch. “I will let that pass,” she allowed big-heartedly; “I won’t even bite you – but only because I’m curious as to what all of this is leading us up to. What was that we were talking about before this little sidelight on my hunting choices? Something about decisions?”

“To lie less,” Paran nodded.

“‘To lie less.’” Yamame nodded as well. “Admirable. The Oni would be proud. About what, for instance?”

“About what you ask me, for instance,” Paran returned. “That is why I am telling you. So that you mind what you ask from now on.”

“And why’s that supposed to be such a big concern?”

Paran shrugged his arms – as far, anyway, as his binds allowed. “Warning, is all.”

Yamame laughed. _A human, warning a spider!_ “This is a tough stone to swallow, you know,” she teased the man trapped – she fancied, in more meanings than one – underneath her. “Come now. A self-professed liar, self-professing honesty? I want to believe you; I really, really want to. There’s trouble, though. I don’t know that I can. Can I, Paran?”

“Why not try?”

“There’s an idea. And I can really ask you anything? _Anything I like_ whatsoever?”

“… Within limits,” Paran said, caution entering his voice. “Ask carefully. Then it is fine.”

“All right. I’ll give it a tug.” Yamame breathed in. “Then… What is your name?”

“Paranseberi.”

“Is it, really?”

“It is how I am known.”

 _That’s not un-true,_ Yamame had to admit. _Oh well._ “All right, ‘Paranseberi,’” she went on. “What is your favourite colour, then?”

“I am boring,” said Paran. “I like black.”

“You aren’t,” said Yamame, frowning. “Neither is black; it’s a very useful colour.” All the same, the spinstress inside her filed away a mental note. “Very good, anyway. Coming right along… Have you ever spent any significant amount of time with any of my sisters?”

A startled delay preceded the answer. “… I have,” Paran confessed at length. “Hachiashi and I have… sat and talked, on occasion.”

“Only Ashi?” Yamame wanted to know. “No others?”

“… I met one other, briefly,” Paran recalled. “I did not get her name; she had only come for something from the storeroom.”

“This is new. And you let her in – just like so?”

“Only human, Yamame,” her human reminded.

“That’s never stopped you stopping me,” Yamame pointed out.

“When storing our payments,” he corrected. “You browse, Yamame; browsing makes storing things difficult.”

Yamame smacked her human. “I do that, yes.”

Paran looked up at her, wounded – at least figuratively. “… Why hit me, then?”

“I don’t like being told I’m difficult.”

“That is not what I said.”

The star of the Underworld made a pout. “It’s what I heard,” she told him. “I’m a silly earth spider, yes, but even I can pick between the threads when they are this thick. Very good, Paran. I promise I’ll not put a single foot inside the storeroom until you’re done storing when we’re done with Hijiri’s guest-house. Which we should get you reporting on soon,” she remembered. “Though, before we go down to that, there’s still one more question I’d like to have answered – clearly.”

“What is it?”

But Yamame Kurodani, a huntress as earth spiders were, knew her human well: as certain as she was herself, he would flee from the last question Yamame had for him, if such an opportunity presented. So, if for nothing else but to close one avenue of escape, Yamame, leaning forward, got up on all fours. So, having first tossed her hair onto her back, she clamped her hands down on the human’s shoulders. So, for no reason but she did not feel safe enough, she locked her knees around his flanks as well. So, tying up the final snare, Yamame Kurodani gave the human the full amber favour of her eyes.

Then, and only then, did the eldest of earth spiders voice her monumental question.

“Tell me, you ‘Paranseberi,’” she said, “Tell me this – and no lying. How do you feel about me? How do you feel about me, really?”

But for all her spider’s spatial acuity, Yamame had never accounted for one unlikely direction: inward. And it was inward now where her human was quickly escaping.

First, with his eyes alone – for those shut like doors once the question had been voiced; then, with his mouth also – for it drew of the quiet air of Yamame’s salon enough to last its owner a long dive in one of the cold underground lakes. Then, with his arms as well – for he shoved them out before Yamame’s face, as though to bar himself from pursuit.

No bar enough to bar Yamame Kurodani; yet even as her spider’s pride began to play at the idea of swatting those brittle arms aside, it – and the sour taste spreading across her mouth – turned out all a premature frustration.

“… Untie me,” Paran said.

Yamame Kurodani, stunned out of her annoyance by the demand, sat right back. Then, eyes squinting, she noticed, “That doesn’t answer my question.”

“No,” Paran agreed. “Untie me first.”

“What for?”

“My shoulders are cramping,” he grunted. “And… it’s tantalising.”

“‘Tantalising?’”

“Untie me, Yamame,” Paran delivered his ultimatum, “and I’ll tell you.”

Then once more he closed his mouth, and spoke no more.

What could she do? Yamame Kurodani, understanding at last what her sister had meant by “stubborn,” let go of her human and his shoulders; and, with a confused feeling of shame, began to pick apart the knots on her ribbon. When it sailed free, and Paran’s arms with it, Yamame watched on, bemused, as her favourite human rubbed kinks out of his wrists which they could not have possibly gotten from a bind this soft.

Maybe it was because she was bemused then, that – once the wrists swivelled around and offered up the human’s open hands – Yamame consigned her own into them without so much as a thought. A fidgety thought did come, yes it did – but only afterwards, when her favourite human gently brushed his fingers up the insides of her palms.

“… I like you, Yamame,” he said at the same time.

Maybe because her palms were ticklish, Yamame let go of a nervous giggle. Maybe because she was giggling, she did not at first notice the human’s fingers firmly threading through her own. Maybe because she then did notice, Yamame Kurodani did not feel her human tensing up for even more.

Quite suddenly, Paran was sitting up.

Quite suddenly, Yamame Kurodani was no longer alone on her topmost level.

Quite suddenly, right in front of the Underworld’s brightest mind, there was a human with his patience stretched way thin, and kissing her good-morning.

Yamame seized up.

Not least out of her over-excitable instincts were rising in any way. Those had been shushed into unwilling docility earlier, when her human’s touch had been much less delicate. Nor was Yamame surprised anymore at being surprised by something so dim-eyed and anaemic as a human. Maybe because her heart was leaping up at her throat, then. Maybe because a thrill was running down her spine making it arch back, as if to facilitate a wider channel of escape for said heart. Maybe Yamame Kurodani did not wish to show her insides to anyone, ever – least of all her human – and that was all.

Or maybe – just maybe, purely hypothetically, nothing too likely – Yamame Kurodani was afraid doing _anything but_ seizing up would scare her human into breaking up the kiss, which – surprise besides – was unexplainably making her feel really, _really_ good.

 _“Good,” Yamame?_ a tiny voice in Yamame’s head was jeering. Unaccountably, it sounded like Ashi’s. _Not just “OK?” Not “trusted?” What is this? An old spider like you, enjoying physicality? For shame._

 _Shut up, Ashi,_ Yamame thought back. Ashi – or her voice – shut up.

But whichever word was correct, none were anyway quick enough to make matter; and Yamame found her breath catching when her human broke the kiss of his own accord. A hand-span or less ahead, he was working on his own breath – even if it was very soon to be expended again, and at length.

Because it was.

“I like you, Yamame,” Paran breathed out, very soon. “I really like you – a lot. More than twice as much as it is appropriate to like a _youkai_ ; probably twice again as much as I’m ready to tell you without my ears burning up. That’s what makes this so tantalising – because, even if it isn’t proper, and you are only a little less unpredictable since before you began exploring, I’ve realised I still want to tell you. But, I’m bad with words, and that’s the problem.”

“You are doing fine,” Yamame assured him. “Keep going.”

“I’ve had three days, Yamame” Paran said, shoulders going up and down dismissively. “It’s a long time to prepare. But since I _have_ had those days, here are some other answers I came up with – so you are spared the effort of asking, and I, of having to rephrase them later. Yes, touching you feels good. I am a human; and you were right when you said we were bizarrely fixated on touching. It’s addictive. No, spider or no inside, outside you are shaped like a girl – a girl who, in her own words, is plenty soft in traditional spots. That is very apparently enough for me. No, just because I said you looked amazing with your hair _down_ doesn’t make it any less amazing when it’s tied up. Only in a different way. Yes, your sewing is incredible. I haven’t seen very much of it, no – and I honestly couldn’t tell you what makes it incredible, because I don’t understand what does. The end effects are still beautiful. And really, no, I don’t much enjoy mushroom tea myself, either. I’d had our first client put a proper blend in our payment, and planned to get you to habituate. I regret nothing.” Paran paused, refilling on his breath again. Yamame, drunken on his voice for once coming out in abundance, let him to do so undisturbed. “And, finally,” the human resumed, “yes, I do have your notes. Hijiri had me accede to some adjustments. ‘Trimming the fat,’ such as she called it. I’ve all the details in those notes. I’ll go over those with you any time you like. We’ve time aplenty: Hijiri said four days until she has those materials you outlined delivered. I pointed the good priestess to whomever reliable I could. It is in her hands now – and out of ours. Worst case, you will have a slower start.”

“That’s a little sloppy,” Yamame complained.

“Spared me another day’s waiting for everyone to sober up. And, well…”

“Yes?” The spinstress smiled. “Was there something else?”

“… Yes,” her human sighed. “Yes, I did that because I wanted to keep my promise. Three days is three days. I’ll pay due if – when – it comes to it.”

“Very good. I’ll count on you being nearby then.”

“I don’t know that I’ll be,” Paran chuckled, all derisive. “Hijiri’s rein on her… disciples… is a little loose. Maybe best she sends our payment someplace in town, and I’ll take it from there. Safer for me, and a little closer to boot. And, Yamame? Speaking of safe…”

“Yes?” asked Yamame. “What is it?”

The human Paran (or ‘Paranseberi,’ as he was known in places – and his god alone knew what other names which he wasn’t telling), squared his back. The motion brought to Yamame’s mind the memory (and it was not entirely an uncomfortable one) of her own back misbehaving not minutes before. She squared hers as well.

Maybe because he mistook it for teasing, but Paran favoured her gymnastics with a warm smile.

“… Well, there is one last thing,” he then said, almost pulling the edges of his lips down by force into a more serious expression. “I will not be taking it now – because if I don’t take breakfast in the next ten minutes and wash my mouth down, I am going to faint – but no, I’ve not forgotten about what _else_ we promised. I’ve been gone for three days, Yamame. That is three—” he hesitated, “no, two now…? Two. Two mornings and three evenings that we missed. You remember, yes?”

“Yes,” Yamame nodded, and somehow kept her own expression straight and professional throughout. “I remember. We did miss those, at that. Hmm.”

“Should we make up?” Paran asked, very seriously.

“I’ll think about it,” Yamame told him, very serious herself. “I’ll let you know, no worries. As soon as I’ve finished thinking it. In the meanwhile – breakfast? You’re making, of course. I can sew beautifully, but the stove’s your field of expertise – and cleaning, too. The ash is piling a little high below, you know? I was putting on water yesterday, and it got all over the floor.”

“… I’ll take it out after we’ve eaten,” her human proposed.

“Very good. And, Paran?”

“Yes?”

“I know holding onto my hands keeps me from clawing,” she granted. “I’m still going to need you to let go, if I’m going to stand up. You know that, yes?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Well, let go, then. I won’t claw. I promise.”

“… Of course.”

Wins, as moods, came and went, and then – most often – were relevant no more. Yamame knew this much.

All the same, even as she tore herself away from her human and climbed back up on her own two feet, the Underworld’s great architect, Yamame Kurodani, remained stoutly confident. Confident that, with enough leeway in technicality (and one or two blind eyes turned), she could still persuade anyone onlooking that, for all she and her human now plainly _looked_ like those partners who – in addition to living together, working together, and trading services – also did these kinds of things, that they were not. That theirs was a partnership of _trust_ and _skill,_ rather than a want for physicality and other nameless sentiments. That – once their food was eaten, and ash taken out – the eldest, most exalted earth spider of all, Yamame Kurodani, would _not_ immediately take her human back to her sofa to discuss those oh-so-trifle missed mornings and evenings which so weighed down on his conscience. And if, by chance, there remained among the watchers-on those who stayed unpersuaded even despite her best efforts…

… Well, they would just have to nurse their envy without her help.

* * *

The four days following fluttered on by on quick, insectile wings. Yamame rounded out her project across that time; once done, she set down her drawing tools and resumed the work on her newest dress with relish. As evening brought each day to a close, she sat in her salon together with her human, and allowed him, who understood nothing of either of her hobbies, to take the related frustrations out of her mind.

Paran did… whatever it was that Parans did when Yamame weren’t looking.

The project had been _gutted._ “Trimming the fat” had been nothing but a furious understatement; and if the priestess Hijiri, for whom the guest-house had been meant, ascribed all of her guests with the same abstemious standards her notes were positively oozing, Yamame worried after the future years of her up-and-coming creation. Gone were the beautiful winding paths and harmonically arranged flowerbeds; nor had the common rooms within the house itself been spared the forbidding red ink of Hijiri’s dictations. An irrational moment’s swing had even seen Yamame’s human put under the scalding hand of blame. Was this how he who walked among earth spiders looked after her beloved works?

But Yamame Kurodani had met the good priestess of _Myouren-ji_ before, once; and her impression from back when was meshing too well with the stern commentary prudishly calligraphed on the margins of Yamame’s own drawings. Nothing out of the expected was happening here. Nor was it within Paran’s duties to defend her work. This was all Yamame and what came out from under her pencils. Her human had done no wrong. He had done his best.

So, doing Yamame’s own best, the Underworld’s great architect copied the offending notes dutifully over to the main draft. Then, this executioner’s job done, she turned her weeping heart back to her dress in making. The heart calmed down a little after that.

These were boring days, when Yamame Kurodani had to wait an agreed date before she may put herself to work in actual. Yet even in ho-hum days like these, things still happened to earth spiders who – swimming in ho-humness as they were – had then no recourse but to slow and take more note.

Two such things happened to Yamame.

( ) A Show After a Fashion.  
( ) Trust That Binds, Bis!  
( ) A Cloaked Stranger the Den Approacheth?!  
( ) A Tea for… Three?


	18. Trust that binds (literally)

(X) Trust That Binds, Bis!

Three days. Three days since her human’s return, inside an evening quietly creeping on, the first of those notable things was caught.

Though the hours which had had the evening preceded had not been empty of notice themselves; nor had Yamame Kurodani – who had, in the meanwhile, all but put the last stitch through her new dress – been about to let them be otherwise. A final, searching look into the tall mirror beside her work-desk, and the spinstress had quit the silent privacy of her bedroom, and walked out into the house’s cosy salon, where her human bade his afternoons as a rule.

Much to the human’s uprising brows, the Yamame who had appeared had been as gold and black as a starry night; for this piece had been designed after the puzzling, fish-scale dress – delivered those long days before from Yamame’s scrap-pile, stolen away by the most mercenary sister in Yamame’s memory. And yet this piece was no scale, but rings: sheets of tiny, black ringlets like mail, layered over similarly dark satin, itself cut into wide triangles which splayed on the skirt of the dress – especially when spun – in the like of a cave-dwelling bat’s wings.

But though she had walked – and span – in front of her human in this show after a fashion, still the human had but a returning jibe to offer in assessment:

“You look good in it, Yamame.”

Might be he had even meant it in this instance; still Yamame Kurodani – who had been too wrapped up yet in her creativity to egg on her favourite for something more than a useless compliment – had stuck out her tongue, and swished on back to her bedroom, where she would sew out the kinks in the dress her human had flagrantly passed over, but which had become very conspicuous when she had spun for him.

Paran’s eye allowing, she would still look good in it regardless.

Some hours passed; and when again she emerged, Yamame Kurodani was a spinstress with another beautiful stitch in the fabric of her career. Nor was the beauty of this stitch (or the spinstress) diminished by her putting back on her usual, earthen-coloured clothes. Why, had she but asked, Paran would likely confirm as much, as well – if only because _he always did._

But even so, Yamame Kurodani did not ask. Not least because she feared a disagreement spoiling the confidence she had in her human; Yamame did not ask because – once she entered again her quiet salon – her favourite envoy, house-minder and issuer of useless compliments was midway into a delightful early evening’s nap.

As she always did when opportunity for mischief presented, Yamame Kurodani smiled a delightfully mischievous smile.

The spinstress had not been lying when she had asked why her human only slept in before their treks out together; but bring though it might back the memory of – mere days earlier – ambushing her human in his sleep springing right back in her silly face (or the side of her silly head, anyway), all the same Yamame, circling around the sofa on the tips of her toes, thought she had an idea coming on. The idea was not very original. Nor was it the smartest which the Underworld’s blond star had had in recent times; it was _even less_ so when put beside how the last such idea of hers had threaded out.

But Yamame Kurodani, the yearly malady, was nothing if not an earth spider to the core; and earth spiders – they were nothing if not flexible creatures.

So Yamame tip-toed back to her bedroom yet again. So she quit it moments later with a length of stout, linen twine in hand. So she held one end between her teeth, and looped it round and round her forearms. So she, with some god (maybe Paran’s) evidently assisting, rounded it off with an askance knot joining both ends tight at her wrists. So tied up, she carefully laid herself out on her sofa beside her human.

Then, nestling her head shamelessly in his lap, Yamame shut her spider’s eyes close, and waited.

And waited…

And waited.

* * *

Waiting cocooned into boredom. That hatched into a butterfly of sleepiness; and ahead she numbered the hundredth breath of the human now serving for her pillow, Yamame Kurodani – care unrolled beyond limit – slipped into an early evening nap of her own. Though this sleep was offering no rest, and no mistake; and she discovered why as soon as opening her eyes – a muddy while later.

Above her, hovering (as though it were he who was an architect, and she – his latest project), a human possessed of two eyes which were as lovable as they were dumb, noticed her waking up. Nor did Yamame fail to notice his noticing; for before even she was fully awake, she sensed the human’s fingers distinctly ceased doing what they had been doing, and stuck – waiting, apparently, the earth spider’s response.

And this, Yamame gave – _after_ she had given a capacious yawn first.

“… Hey,” was the response.

“… Hello,” was the reply to the response, and the fingers remained stuck.

Nothing further for Yamame Kurodani. But perhaps to the good; for it gave her a window through which to take stock of herself below her mouth. Her arms were there, and tied as she’d left them – which the spinstress confirmed again with a touch of mistaken reply from her instincts. The dress, as well as what it was storing, and her legs also reported to her probing, as she squeezed the sleepy residue out of their muscles. Nothing was amiss…

… And perhaps _because nothing was_ , Yamame Kurodani turned up a frown at her human.

“All right,” she demanded. “Give. Why my hair?”

Paran’s eyes shifted away from being lovable and deeper into dumbness for a moment. “… Was I supposed not to?”

Yamame ground the back of her head into his leg. “I didn’t say that,” she said. “I asked you a question. I didn’t want you to reason; I wanted you to answer. Why my hair?”

The human’s mouth hung open – maybe to unroll the pent-up reasoning – before an answer proper was seamed.

“… Safest?” he chanced.

Had biting him now not been like to validate his fears completely, Yamame would have sunk her teeth right in. But she did show those teeth in a grimace, and that had to do. “Hadn’t we gone over that?” she moaned. “I’d thought we had.” The spinstress thrust out her bound wrists. “See, here? I couldn’t have done anything anyway. Why the caution? I know, I still startle… sometimes… but you—”

Paran sighed. The sigh crashed against her extended hands, and, unaccountably, Yamame felt the balance of her argument tip away. “… Yamame,” Paran said, and his voice was tired, “let’s not.”

“Not what?”

“Not pretend you couldn’t snap this tie without a second thought.” He paused, a new possibility presenting. “… Maybe even a first,” he corrected. “You said so yourself. You startle. That is grounds for caution.”

“Well, I—!”

 _Could have,_ agreed the wry, sisterly voice inside Yamame’s head. Yamame fixed it with a go-away glare until it shrugged and went away.

But it had said the truth, as the human had, and that was the trouble. Far was it from Yamame Kurodani to confess it aloud and hand her house-minder his victory so soon; even so, stout though they were, her binds _really were_ nothing against her _youkai_ ’s strength. A twist, and the linen twine would break easier than a web snagged by an overlarge animal. A turn, and sooner than his heart’s next beat, the human would be at the mercy of Yamame’s plague-bearing fangs. A bite – a short clench – and he would be visiting with his poor, namesake god earlier than leastwise one of them would have liked.

Yamame screwed up her mouth. Her error was on display; and the human Paran – never one to mistake her gestures for whichever others were more convenient at the time – smiled, and took the victory she wasn’t offering, regardless. He splayed out the fingers of his hand which he had kept locked in her hair, and began to – slowly, gently – scrape the rounded tips of his fingernails back and forth along her scalp.

“… It doesn’t feel good?” he asked.

Wrong-footed (wrong-handed?) by the question, Yamame gave up. Not before furnishing her loss with a token pout; yet puff up her cheeks though she could with all her _youkai_ might, Yamame Kurodani, mother of plagues, the yearly malady, was still as capable of losing as any other old earth spider faced with the same circumstance.

… At least, so she hoped. She closed her ageing eyes.

“No,” she sighed. “It does. It feels good.”

 _It feels good, does it,_ the same internal voice, which Yamame had thought glared away, mocked. _How easy it comes now. That word._

It did, too. Since she had first admitted (to herself as much as anyone) there had been more to Paran’s company than trust and assistance, the word – “good” – had come with reducing difficulty each time. Yamame Kurodani with an injured pride was not unlike the doctor whose pet had so recently come to level accusations at the spinstress and her siblings; she wrapped it up – thickly – until it was healed. Not so here. Not when the win was cheap, and the wound so small. Not so when she herself had all but bared her weakness herself.

And certainly not when offering it up felt _so good._

All the same, as pestilential winds change and lash around, so too did Yamame come around soon to a new and bright idea.

So – the full imperious favour of her amber eyes presently trained once more upon her sometimes bland subject – Yamame raised her connected arms in a mute instruction. The human, understanding, issued the earth spider a nod – of his head first, then the full upper half of his body in turn. Yamame fastened on immediately. She slid her looped arms behind Paran’s neck, and, herself, nodded.

Then she braced, even as Paran began – with an ostensive lack of effort that surprised her even now – to right up, pulling her along: first up to a sit, then, farther, sideways onto his lap.

As it had at the ease with which the human human-handled its body, the spider inside Yamame now wondered at how _naturally_ their arrangement had been changed. How these following moments – and no word passed between one and the next – saw the otherwise spatially insensitive creature called Paran somehow find just the perfect space in which to slot the – apparently easily handled – underground _youkai_. How – again, no customary human preamble ambling before – he quietly allowed her to slip her arms from the (awkward at this angle) place on his back, and rest them instead across her own lap. How, perhaps in reimburse, his own arms looped neatly around her waist, drawing her closer.

None of it spoke to the eight-legged architect lounging in Yamame’s head, of course. Still, even she, in all her geometrical brilliance, had to give that it cut a fair enough approximate to something that was _not_ totally human and thus artless and clumsy. Something that, had she but the words and the promise nobody’s ear was turned, she would say was not _completely_ without merit. On balance, it was even, in some unmannered and un-spidery way, pleasant.

Satisfied with being satisfied, the outside Yamame, presently embraced, produced a satisfied sound. Satisfaction threading in such volume just inside his arms had to alert even the dull-eared human; and Paran did alert – shifting below her, and letting roll a deep, vibrating sound of his own.

That was all he did, though.

At length – longer than Yamame was bothered to measure – the spinstress wove out of the sea of satisfaction, and back onto the land of words.

“So?” she asked her pillow.

Her pillow moved, lurching out of its distraction. “… So what?” it asked back.

“So, what if I couldn’t?”

“Couldn’t what?”

Yamame jabbed out with one elbow. “What if I couldn’t break the bind,” she explained. “We’ve agreed that you like to… that you enjoy touching. That it comprises your lining, more or less. I’ve seen it at work – first hand, actually. So, what if I couldn’t? What if I absolutely _had_ to have a few thoughts before I could break free and chomp your fingers off? Hmm? Where would you touch then?”

Paran, squirming, reeled in a hissing breath. “… Really?” he breathed out. “That still?”

“Really.” Yamame jabbed again. “That still.” She spun it into a firm, but friendly, rub. “Come, now. I know you like my hair. I’ve known it; it’s one of the rare things about me you’ve stooped to compliment. Right?”

“Right.”

“That, and my neck. Which makes for an amazing place, if you trust the rumour mill. Well. I want something else, though. So give. There has to be something… right?”

Paran caught – and chewed through, and swallowed – another chunk of thick air. Then, he gave his grunting assent, “… You promise not to laugh?”

Yamame giggled. “Have I ever? Very good, Paran. I promise.”

“… Very good,” Paran replied… and if ever had “good” really meant “bad,” Yamame’s human made the paradox now.

And yet, good or opposite, before much too long his answer began working out; and, with a sense of apprehensive curiousness, Yamame Kurodani looked on below to watch her human’s hand softly disengage from her waist.

All at once the image reoccurred to her of a morning prior to these revolutionary days – when the same hand had come away from the selfsame waist, in an approximate set of things. Then, the motion had been less advertent. Indeliberate. Accidental, even – if the human’s assurances afterward were to be given the faith they had begged; and it had startled Yamame all but out of her skin to have been so touched.

Now, that same, stray hand was boldly tracing her thigh through the fabric of her dress, doing so with such deliberation she _almost jumped again._

Maybe, Yamame dully realised, it made no matter either way. Maybe touching her would always spell a degree of risk for her human – in his mind and reality both. Maybe that degree was _even greater now_ , that she was awake, than when she had been asleep. Maybe Paran had known this, and more, and so dissembled every time.

That he was touching her _even so_ made Yamame’s tiny heart squeeze.

Almost, and she would have lost his next words in the noise of her blood rushing through her ears. But the hand was stopped, cupping the rise of her knee underneath the dress; and Paran, with a pronouncement like a judge’s, spoke the terrible truth.

“These,” he said, his voice rusty with guilt. “I like these.”

Yamame did not laugh at first. Not at all; she traced and retraced the same thread of reasoning he had, from her waist to the point of her knee, confused all the way. “… My knees?” she asked finally. “You like my knees?”

Paran could not bear it. He clicked his tongue. “Your legs,” he rasped. “I like your legs, Yamame. At large.”

Yamame Kurodani, the eldest of earth spiders, cast downward to review her legs. They were, she had to say, decent enough legs – serviceable, for lacking in number. They carried her reliably from her work desk to her bed, and wherever else she required as well; they made for good support when she was carrying bags of plaster or pallets of bricks. They were, as Hachiashi had once said, as long as the ground – and thus perfectly functional. They walked, and jumped, and kicked, and stood all very good.

None of that registered to Yamame as overmuch impressive. Most legs did. What else was there?

At last, she ceded her defeat. “I don’t get it,” she said. “I don’t understand. Were you making fun just now? Why my legs? Is it because I’m a spider?”

Paran swelled up with a great sigh. “It is because you walk around in your sleepwear, Yamame,” he blew out. “Your legs show.”

 _Come to mention it, I do at that,_ Yamame thought. “And this is why you like them,” she questioned on; “because you’ve seen them a lot?”

Paran’s reply rang tragic. “It certainly doesn’t help.”

“But why my legs?”

“They are…” The human groped around for words. “… They’re exciting,” he concluded. “I guess.”

Yamame chuckled. “You can get excited? You? This is new.”

“I have… once or twice. I try not to show it.”

“Why not?”

“It isn’t—” He hesitated. “… It is not proper.”

Now it was Yamame’s turn to be tragic. “We’ve talked about that, too,” she moaned; “haven’t we? Propriety? I don’t know about that. I’m a spider; I _don’t know_ which ones of those things you humans do are decided proper or how. I just don’t know. I’m not greatly bothered, either.”

“But I am.”

Almost abruptly, Paran removed the adventurous hand from Yamame’s knee and reattached it to her waist. Almost, and Yamame would have been vexed by its escape – but for the human’s continued speculation.

“Maybe,” said Paran, “Maybe it’s all instincts. Maybe it is little different from you reacting to touch as you do, or biting. Maybe it is what we are. What do you say to that?”

“I say I like you less and less each time you remind me,” Yamame joked humourlessly. “I’ve told you this, too. I’m trying. I let you touch me every day. How long has that been, again? Have I bitten you so far?”

“… No.”

“That’s right. I haven’t. And did you know why? It’s because I’m trying, Paran. I want to _keep trying,_ and I’m _doing my best._ Are you?”

“You’re stronger than I am, Yamame,” Paran noted.

“And this is why embarrassing me in front of others is fine, you think? And embarrassing yourself when it is only us two somehow isn’t? This propriety of yours seems to me more tangled the more I hear about it.”

The human said nothing.

“Is it a thing of pride, Paran?” asked Yamame.

“… It is,” the human conceded. “It is a thing of pride.”

“Then perhaps nothing can be done.”

 _Not yet, anyway,_ she added inside. _Not all at once._

Though the silence which followed her admission was stiff and not a little stunned; but Yamame had handed victory over already inside this round of her bedroom clock’s arms, and one in addition hurt her very little. It hurt even less when she pushed her head entreatingly into the human’s shoulder. Symmetry struck again; and the same troublesome hand from before now trailed up and up the selfish spider, until its long fingers were in her hair again. Then it stopped hurting altogether.

“… So,” Yamame purred (purred!). “… My legs, then?”

“Your legs,” Paran agreed.

The spinstress made a little chuckle. “But that’s so trivial!”

“My mother always told me not to be simple,” Paran said sardonically. “I think I’ve disappointed her.”

Now Yamame did laugh. And she laughed in earnest…

… laughed, until her laughter lumped up, then died in her windpipe as she realised, with a mental raking of her nails, that the first time her human had ever _openly mentioned his family_ had just caught then torn back free of her web. But Yamame Kurodani was a spider, surprised or no. She was the eldest among her hunter kin; and even out of their homes, the spiders’ hunting grounds were…

… They were elsewhere. Not here. Not in these human-infested realms overgrown with reasoning and words. But this was irrelevant.

The spinstress cleared her throat of the clog. The sound was at once too quiet and too loud for her sensitive liking. “Your… mother,” she said. It hadn’t struck out quite right, so she said it again. “Your mother. Yes? What… Who is she? What does she do? What’s her name?”

Assaulted by these questions (let alone the spider), Paran made like many prey make, and played an inanimate pillow. Then the reality occurred that Yamame was too close – that even she would not be fooled by so sheer a pantomime – and her human mirrored her coughing. “… My mother,” he grudgingly admitted; “she’s human. Though you would hear elsewise if you asked her servants.”

“Servants?” Yamame was surprised. “Your mother is so important?”

She felt the human rub his head against her left and right. “No. My mother, she…” He wavered. “Our… She _inherited_ a large household,” he finally settled. “With kitchens and gardens and storehouses. Servants came with.”

“What does your mother do?”

“She… makes things.”

Yamame’s curiosity flared. “What kind?”

“She’s a… A craftsman,” Paran grunted. “Like… Well. Like you.”

“What does she make?”

“Is it terribly important?”

 _Yes,_ thought Yamame. But sensing her human’s reluctance (or was it shame?), she volunteered a weak, “Maybe not. Maybe it isn’t terribly important. What about your… your other parent?”

At first, no reply was forthcoming from her human. Almost, and Yamame would have thought him reverted to the previous tactic; that they were now on ground where proximity and temperature meant not a thing, and where a human may pass for a pillow and no spider could tell differently. Then, however, Paran did answer after all; and his voice was a tiny, sour thing in Yamame’s ear. “My father,” her human murmured, “was the simplest person I’d ever known. I think… I think he disappointed my mother more than I have.”

“Who… Who was he?”

“A man,” Paran grunted. “A man. With a lot to prove.”

 _I don’t know what that means,_ wanted to complain; but then, her favourite human – quite without delay (and with a mind-reader’s insight) – hurried on with a much-needed explanation. An explanation which – clearly evidenced – required Yamame’s nose be put out of joint before all else.

He was pushing her away.

All but, and Yamame would have launched into a harsh critique of such a rude turn of events – only then, suddenly, it all became very clear and very silly; and Yamame’s nose, rather more colourful though it now was, was at once returned to its place.

A smattering of moments after, and the kiss – which was like to have been the human’s intention all along – was withdrawn; and Yamame Kurodani, the blond star of the Underworld, glowing like it was about to explode, managed to speak a flushed question.

“… What was that?”

Her favourite human frowned. “… A kiss,” he replied, very seriously. “It was a kiss.”

Yamame gave him a reproaching look. “I know what it’s called,” she said. “I’ve remembered. I meant, was that the evening one? Already?”

Paran looked wounded. “… It was an ‘I like you’ kiss.”

“We are doing those now?” Yamame blinked up at him, wide-eyed. When the human vouchsafed no answer, only stared on, she began to laugh. “No rules? No compacts? Nothing? Not even a little ritual? What would your god say if he saw?”

“My god,” Paran scowled, “sees and says nothing.”

 _Nothing you would deign to hear, anyway,_ Yamame added in a cleverer nook of her head. The cleverness was bitter and spoiled. The eldest of underground spinstresses therefore spun out a sheet of something else to cover – “cunning,” she liked to call it – and threw it like a cape around the human’s shoulders together with her still restrained arms.

The untreated linen was seriously beginning to chafe her skin.

“If that is so,” she smiled regardless as she told her so-captured human, “then we are still behind on the evening one, no? Shall we take care of that as well, while we’re both here?”

“Already?” Paran echoed. Somehow, someway, he had kept his face the antipode of teasing.

Yamame felt teased all the same. As well she responded in kind. “I could be tided over with another ‘I like you’ one, I guess,” she granted. “That is, if you really believe it’s too early. Or, we could have it done with off your human timetable, and go to bed a little sooner today. It’s your propriety, Paran. You exercise it.”

 _Because I will, too,_ she finished in the privacy of her mind, wrapping one leg around the human’s side.

Paran made a show of considering. It was a good show: threaded through with expressions of unfathomable internal conflict; but it was done so quick the human may very good have never bothered at all.

All the same, Yamame Kurodani never did find out which kind the kiss that followed had been meant to be.

All the same, Yamame Kurodani did not complain. Trust, care, partnership – now like as well – were communicating; and that, for now, was enough to wrap her heart in a soft blanket of pleasant emotions. It was a blanket she wished fervently a certain human had taught her how to sew sooner. Much sooner.

The best if from the start.

But even now the blanket had in it a hidden black thread.

Trust, care, partnership and like besides, something else had been woven in between; and the spinstress at Yamame’s heart dimly began to recognise what kind of material this was. It was coloured like “Shut up, Yamame;” it had the make of _a warning_ ; and when she touched it, the texture distinctly called up an image of a silly earth spider, with her easily disjointed nose, poking her fingers into things her silly earth spider’s mind could _possibly never understand._ It was an unspoken caution – a kind of black ultimatum – that any blanket gifted on no specific condition was just as readily taken away. That any compact spoken under no god was just as soon rescinded. That any kiss outside the rule was just as easily _not given._

But then, Yamame thought, if not knowing much of her human’s parentage was the price to pay for these new privileges…

… Then she had been living with the promissory note inside her pocket for months already.

Hadn’t she?

* * *


	19. Chapter 19

(X) A Cloaked Stranger the Den Approacheth?!

Then, the date came, which dates are given to do, unattended.

It brought the promise of work nearing. It brought Yamame out of bed an hour and more before the customary; it brought a mood underlined with excitement, but a number of pins and needles as well. Specially, it brought with it the second of those notable things, which earth spiders, unawares, blunder into now and then.

Yamame Kurodani, an earth spider as far as memory stretched, was sitting, cross-legged atop her sofa, and combing her freshly washed hair. The hour, for being so early, effected her human was nowhere awake – nor underfoot – quite yet. The giddying spinstress had therefore used of this free time; she had pinched some leftovers, boiled a pot of water, showered, and now tugged the twists out of her golden hair, all the while threading with the idea of, very soon, meeting again with _Myouren-ji_ ’s famed (or was she infamous?) master.

Yamame Kurodani, the yearly malady, had visited on Byakuren Hijiri before. But being called upon again by the very matriarch who had banished the earth spider officially from her domain in retaliation to an innocent (if admittedly indelicate) joke – it went around the eyes of all the needles in Yamame’s mental drawer. Maybe pride _was_ speaking. Maybe being reduced to _an outcast_ again had punched its fangs deeper under Yamame's skin than she had told herself. _And what about my sisters?_ Those could be told to behave, as they had been – or otherwise threatened. But the other side? What about Hijiri and her supplicants; what about those _youkai_ devouts of hers with no love for the underfolk? And what of those human visitors that Yamame had joked about, to whom the earth spiders were to be contractually displayed?

Yamame began counting bodies.

The count was bodied out of her head when a knock broke out like a rash on the house’s door; and Yamame, quietly grateful (for she was running out of digits), stood up to receive the visitor.

What… or who stood, two prim steps away the door outside when she opened it, was a total stranger.

Tall, a third again as tall as Yamame – perhaps taller even than her human, difficult as it may be – the stranger wore over all a hooded traveller’s cloak: dark and stained, and ripped around the knees, held close on the front with a patinated, silver crest. Their hooded face was turned away: gazing out, sideways from Yamame’s house, seemingly toward the smooth basalt stone of the cavern’s wall. Heavy boots, caked with rock dust and muck, told loudly of the length this creature had come to stand before her now.

Yamame Kurodani, never once having turned someone at her door away, stepped forward to greet this unexpected guest…

… And stiffened like a corpse when the senses at the core of her being shrieked at her all at once.

The stranger _smelled like death._

Not the rich, cloying stench of rotted flesh; nor the sepulchral exhalation of an unearthed tomb. This was death _absolute_. It smelled of emptiness; it smelled of old ashes; it had an almost acrid scent of an underground cavern so deeply encased in layers and layers of ice it had been forgotten to the world. It was a _void_ of smells – of sights, of sounds – whose grasping influence promised to take away everything: man, gods and _youkai_ all. It was nothingness so great, so profound, the merest _flicker_ of anything, even emotion, could light it up forever. It was hunger and oblivion.

Yamame recoiled. She wanted to run.

The stranger, perhaps hearing her teeth grind, turned their shadowed face… and pulled down the hood.

… And what produced from that hood was so simple, and stood in such sheer contrast with the horrifying smell, that briefly Yamame doubted her enduring sanity.

It was a face. A male, clean-shaven, human face – reserved, yet laugh-lined – and – though not _at all_ similar – Yamame knew at once cut from the same whole cloth as the one she had been seeing (very closely) every day. A pair of inquisitive eyes, as grey as cold rain, looked out to her from under a fringe of closely-scythed hair the colour (and it seemed consistency) of dry wheat.

The stranger’s head cocked, as though opening for an answer to some unspoken question (or comment). Then, as if realising a mistake, his jaw hastily hinged open, and he spoke.

“Yamame Kurodani?”

The yearly malady blinked. His voice had been shockingly young. “… Huh?”

“Are you?” the stranger wanted to know.

The one certainty brought to the fore, Yamame answered, “Yes. I am. And you…?”

The stranger frowned. There was a disbelieving pause. “You don’t know who I am?”

“No.” Her _youkai_ ’s mind was beginning to fold in on itself. “Who are you?”

A reply of sorts coalesced behind the stranger’s strangely aged eyes (or perhaps it was a trick of the colour?), but it appeared was taken on rein before it may travel down to his tongue. Instead, the stranger stepped a step back yet… and bowed. The bow was so complex and done with such flourish all but it seemed a spiral parody of itself.

“An it please thee,” the stranger intoned. “My name is… Santuko Takumi. A storyteller by trade. A messenger by necessity. Today, most of all.” He dug into his cloak, and out came a small, pink envelope. “She was very happy about it,” he said cryptically.

Yamame reached out and swiped the envelope from his fingers as though they were snapping vipers. Santuko… though she felt he could have been a Stefan, a Dias, or even a Paran for all she knew… backed away, prudent. It was a small victory – almost unnoticeable – and smaller yet, when Yamame saw the round, waxen seal stamped onto the lid of the envelope.

Two letters “K” – one regular, one reversed – ornately described within a circle of thorny vine. Opposite, yet united: joined into one symbol by a snaking tendril of the same vine (or was it really?), coiled round and round their touching backs. Yamame knew these twinned letters; for here was the sigil of the Komeiji family, stately all, even if the envelope itself was little so.

The spinstress felt a reluctant thrill in her chest.

“Is this passage new?”

The stranger’s delusive voice jerked her attention back up. His head was once more turned, those unsettling eyes locked on the same spot as before on Yamame’s cavern’s wall. _The tunnel up,_ she realised.

“It’s… some years old,” she replied.

The man’s brows snaked together as if the words had been an insult directed at his own age.

“Are those stairs?” he asked either way.

“Yes.”

“Are those new?”

“Some months.”

“And they go out to the surface?”

“Yes.”

Again, the man grimaced. “The Crone is going softer on me.”

“What?”

But whoever this Crone was, and in whichever place she was growing soft, the stranger was disinclined to say. An almost hungry glint in his eyes, he bowed once more – and this bow was anything but complex – and made off at an impatient trot for the very opening they had discussed. Yamame Kurodani watched the man, who could not have been named Santuko if he had chiselled it into his forehead, until the darkness in the tunnel swallowed him whole.

Then, she closed the door.

Alone now, safe inside the familiar angles of her house, Yamame cast one last time at the seal locking the envelope. The sister “K”s gleamed back at her regally. Yamame cracked them in two between her fingers.

A sheet of perfumed paper slid out onto her waiting hands. Satori Komeiji’s beautiful longhand glowed at her from the front, all pretty arches and loops; and despite the strangeness of the previous minutes, or the pending meeting with the priestess Hijiri, Yamame found a smile tugging shyly at her cheeks.

「 _Dearest earth spider, Yamame Kurodani,_ 」 said the opening line. 「 _Hopefully this letter finds you well._

_Thank you for your input regarding the lately incident. With your account to complete ours, anyone to formally challenge us again on our alleged involvement should, in the words of someone we both know, come home short of an ear. As a matter of fact, I have already asked for my scissors to be whetted specially for this purpose. A small joke._

_More importantly, thank you very much for writing. It’s gratifying – not to mention flattering – to be addressed by one of the Underworld’s citizens in this capacity. It reminds me what I, regardless of my own little problems, still very much am. I cannot state how much brighter your letter has made my study, not to mention my mood._

_For this, Yamame – may I address you by name? – I am infinitely grateful. Although I fully accept your reasons were not entirely selfless. Still. Never mind._

_It has also been brought to my ears that your... shall we say, other endeavours? – have been progressing well. I mean both of them, just in case. As a matter of fact, I desire for you to know I am at your service as Old Hell’s vicereine in this regard as well. Should anyone, in any measure, expose those endeavours to danger, know that the full authority of my name and my station stand firmly at your side. It is perhaps a small consolation for the Capital’s grand architect, but it’s what I want to gift to you all the same._

_It’s the least you’ve deserved._

_Consider writing again some time. And thank you once more._

_Yours Truly (whether you like or no),  
—Satori Komeiji & h_

Yamame, fully smiling, moved her thumb aside.

「 _—Satori Komeiji & husband,_」 the signature proclaimed.

Suddenly, some things made just a bit more sense.

* * *


	20. Work, work

Not _a lot_ of sense, perhaps. But enough anyway to keep Yamame Kurodani’s face a-smile when she tiptoed past her human’s room’s door.

Paran’s eight-mat nest-within-a-nest was as always a picture of neatness. No discarded pillows, crumpled papers nor loose pencils poised to stab at her heels; nor had Yamame to step over and around heaps of clothes and raw materials marked forever for later. Only this room, its soft mat floor, a few baskets of unknown personal effects stored under one wall, and – in the centre of it all – her human, pulled in a thick blanket atop his simple _futon._ There was a metaphor here somewhere.

Yamame salted it away for a less interesting day.

Across the room, and she was kneeling at the sleeping human’s side. Not touching him in any way; for Yamame remembered still the last time she had woken her human in such a manner. Instead, pushing against an unaccounted surge of awkwardness, she softly called his name.

The human remained stoutly asleep. Yamame, feeling hot in her ears, called out a little louder.

Paran, living up to his divine name, took mercy; and Yamame’s awkward efforts were at last rewarded with the sight of her human climbing to a sit up from his blankets – climbing, yawning, knuckling at his eyes – and finally looking on the close mother of plagues with a total lack of fear, surprise, or anything else which would have been there almost always before. The look somehow made her feel very warm.

But proceedings beckoned, and Yamame stored away this scrap as well.

“Sleep well?” she asked him. “You looked like you were.”

Her human let that pass. “… Going out?”

“It’s the date, isn’t it?”

“… Suppose it is.”

 _Would you postpone it if you could?_ a sillier part of Yamame wondered. The sillier parts of her human remained oblivious to her telepathic questioning.

“Anything to do while you’re gone?” Paran asked instead.

Yamame had prepared for this. “Take the trash out and burn it somewhere. Soon as you can. Maybe the stink will have cleared out when I’m back this time around.”

“I could take it to one of the side chambers.”

“That might help,” Yamame agreed. “I want you to take a look inside the kettle, too. There was scale in the water when I took it out to shower earlier.”

Paran’s misty gaze slid up and down her body as though to confirm whether she was saying the truth. “… All right,” he gave up. “Very good. Anything else?”

Yamame took a good, long look at her human. Not least because Paran looked right _miserable_ straight out of his bed; though this alone could have been a fair reason any other time. Yamame took a good, long look at her human because _she wanted a very clear picture of him_ in her mind.

It was a silly feeling. It was a silly feeling and an even sillier desire; and though even Yamame – mired up to her nose in silliness – could very good name it, the nimble spider of her interior spun it around.

Yamame knew what she was feeling. She might not be privy to the complete set of _why_ s or _how_ s or _what to do with it_ s; but she could at the very least tell when she was going to miss her human. Him and his – sometimes still puzzling – attentions both.

 _But what about him?_ If she walked out now, would he miss her also?

Yamame had but to look at his slack expression to know that, most likely…

( ) … He would miss her.  
( ) … He would not.

* * *

(X) … He would miss her.

… That he would miss her.

Yamame Kurodani had no gods, no… but she did have faith. She believed, devotedly, that a web spun well would remain hanging even to the next week. She had faith that a nail hammered in right would not wiggle out on its own; she trusted, with never fraying certainty, that a properly laid roof should not begin to leak in its first rain. Yamame Kurodani believed _in order_ : in an indelible marriage between cause and its effect, in the pull of the stone beneath her feet, and the heat of the fire under her stove. She believed morning came after the night.

More pertinently, Yamame Kurodani, the yearly malady, believed not even her human could have been left unimpressed on by their lately rituals. Paran may have had a brick wall’s permeability, but he was not quite _that_ dense. Yamame Kurodani had given her best; she had done everything lay within her power to imprint her feebly understood feelings in whichever parts of her human had been dared to expose. He would miss her and no mistake… or, if not _her_ – then her hair, her neck, or her legs.

Surely.

That was the make of things. There was nothing else, for now, for her to do.

And just as much, she freely told him. “Nothing. Nothing that comes to mind.” She smiled. Then, matching his gesture from a few days before, she reached out and touched his cheek. Paran’s closer eye dropped shut lazily, and his head pushed softly against her hand. Yamame had to chuckle to patch over the heat unexplainably working up her own face. “We’re going to be overnighting on site, as agreed, so I’ll come to fetch you in seven days,” she said unceremoniously, rising up and coming away. “Seven or so, anyway. Hijiri may trip on some additional ideas along the way. That woman doesn’t know how to let a joke go. I’ll have to warn my sisters not to make any passing remarks about smoke towers and altars for sacrifice. We’re already light on stone as we are – never mind metal rods for braziers. It’s going to be a nervous build. Altogether not looking forward to it.”

Paran looked about to unleash something Yamame could have laughed at; but it expired in his mouth and must have turned sour very quick, for he was frowning dumbly at Yamame as the spinstress backed on her tiptoes to the door.

“Seven days, or abouts,” she told him, one hand on the sliding panel. “All right?”

Paran swallowed the dead words down. “… Yes,” he replied. “Seven. Very good.”

“All right. Keep count. Good day, Paran.”

“Yes.” He nodded. Then, bizarrely, he added, “Good morning.”

The paper-and-wood door _tock_ ed shut behind her. The spinstress, wrapping this latest mystery up together with the rest, briskly slid into her eagerly waiting shoes. Then she quit the warm confines of her house, before other thoughts rooted. The caves outside were damp and dewy, issues of recent rain upside. Yamame headed down.

The hour in following brought her before the large, two-storey shared-house, which her many sisters now – as they had since Old Hell’s unsealing a handful of years before – occupied in another subterranean bubble of the Underworld. Yamame strode in, knocking aside the stout, Oni-fashion door she herself had painstakingly ground down and fitted into its frame. A number of her sisters were accounted for on the ground floor. They swelled up like hungry fledglings from their seats as she entered the common room, giggling and yabbering all at once.

“Settle!” Yamame ordered.

Then, in clipped, uncomplicated terms she explained to them what they were about to do and – more importantly – what they weren’t.

To their credit, the explaining – presaged already by Hachiashi passing on the news some days ago – took only almost as much as Yamame’s journey down had. The eldest of earth spiders (now a little older still) then tentatively concluded her younger kin would not, in their illimited excitement, leave any necessary tools or manners behind when they followed; and she left again.

This time, for the Sun-bathed world above.

On a whim – a chiffon-sheer fancy, nothing relevant to anything – she chose a route through the anthill-like burrows that would not circle her around by her own domain.

The route would take somewhat longer to spit her out into _Gensokyo_ ’s open skies; but Yamame Kurodani was nothing if not a persevering hunter. She would navigate these seldom travelled tunnels. She would brave them however long she must – even if they winded, confused her ears with silence, or made her feel not at all like the spider she was.

She had, after all, been doing it for weeks already.

* * *

The endless forests of _Gensokyo_ shimmered past wetly below her, mottled in half a hundred hues of green; until, at one sudden point, they sheared off to give way to the flats and meadows which marked the humans’ realm.

From her vantage high in the air, looking toward Sun-rise, it was possible to see the Human Village itself: a grid of terracotta roofs and packed-dirt streets sheeting a mild, loaf-shaped hill and spilling outward like an overlarge tablecloth, trimmed all around with a forbidding wall. The intervening landscape was a checkerboard of rice fields, orchards and grasslands, spaced evenly with highways for workmen and wagoners, all of which convened invariably on the closer of the town’s mirrored gateways. The graceful arch over the gate was positively festooned with hanging garlands, banners and wards against evil. The sidelong morning light cast them as large – but pointless – teeth in the arch’s extended shadow.

Yamame willed down the absolutely pressing business to see whether the town’s streets also were crossing at geometrical angles (or, since they were human streets, how off-angle they were); instead, she cast west, along the light, where _Myouren-ji_ ’s hunchback roof was bulging from the woods just beyond the farthest field out. The Buddhist temple, named so purportedly after Hijiri’s missing relative (or, some said, lover), had offended Yamame’s orderly sensibilities the first time she had lain eyes on it. Now, her architect’s mind clinically reconfirmed what her injured pride had since held close – that _Myouren-ji_ was _a fish_ , not a temple: a huge, landed, wooden fish, planted with its rounded belly sticking up, and buried halfway to its fins. All it would take would be one overdrunk Oni to heave it up and flip it over. Then it could go swimming again in the grey ocean of _Gensokyo_ ’s sky.

Or, equally likely, Yamame thought, the green sea of its woods. The strokes of fishy preference were unknowable.

Might be, and Yamame could name just the Oni for the job as well; only then, her feet touched her down on the rain-sodden approach to the temple’s main _toori_ gate. A small, canine-eared server _youkai_ , spotting her, skipped up with a wicker broom firmly held _en garde_ in both tiny hands. Cataloguing the mother of plagues somehow as nothing much to fear – after all, who sane would assault Byakuren Hijiri’s home? – the minute _youkai_ then grinned, cupped its hands around its mouth, and blasted an ear-shattering “ **GOOD MORNING!** ” point-blank at the spider.

Yamame Kurodani, ears ringing, grinned back and ruffled the tiny watchdog’s hair for its efforts. The replying expression reminded her closely of someone she liked.

But someone she _did not_ was even closer.

At the far end of the approach, where it crashed on the fish’s (or temple’s) open mouth, spilling left and right into the shadowed courtyard, Yamame could see _Myouren-ji_ ’s master herself, standing in a discussion with the spear-wielding _Bishamon_ and a gaggle of aides. The priestess – signalled by her adorable doorbell going off – bowed in an apology to the black-robed supplicants; then, cracking away from the group, she marched out to meet with the vaunted visitor from the Underworld.

Byakuren Hijiri, the Buddhist, master of _Myouren-ji_ , the Sealed Great Magician, the Acharya Who Surpassed – and other such titles which Yamame held to little care – cut an imposing, fleshy figure out of the surrounding air. Hers was merely the _secondary_ presence within the temple – the most elevated honours belonging by rights to the god _Bishamonten_ ’s standing representative – though anyone professing this illusion in a private conversation would be patronisingly corrected. The priestess Hijiri might indeed play second fiddle to the _Bishamon_ , and – unlike the god’s avatar – wield no visible arms. That much might be true. And yet, anyone to challenge Byakuren Hijiri would very soon find the temple’s spiritual guidance an appealing last resort. She filled out her black clothes like a brawler. She stamped the heels of her hard-shod boots like a warrior Oni. She was a boulder carven down into a female shape, but – pleasing though it was – the form belied the explosive strength beneath. She was a thousand years’ rage, smothered under a will to match.

Most of all – and most acutely to Yamame – somehow, Byakuren Hijiri _did not smell._

Not in the way Yamame’s human could be generously ascribed after scalding in the shower – nor that of a slice of bread left out too long and toughened to stone. Byakuren Hijiri did have _a_ smell – but it was the smell of her environs, scooped up and compressed, until it conformed to her shape like clothing. Yamame knew it to be nothing else but a mask… even if she did not know what the mask was designed to conceal. She did not like it all the same.

The priestess stamped to a careful halt some twenty paces ahead. Then, recognising at last the identity of her guest, her priestly exterior rusted away in flakes. Hijiri palmed her face almost comically.

“… I’d hoped I’d been wrong,” she murmured, her matronly voice pained.

Yamame scented an insult. “Wrong about what?”

“I’d hoped—” Hijiri began. Then, drawing herself back up to her full height, she explained, “I’d hoped I’d misremembered your name. But you are. You are Yamame Kurodani.”

The earth spider crafted a retort, but spooled it in before it let fly. She sketched a dismissive shrug. “I’m not here to eat anyone, if it helps.”

“A little,” Hijiri granted with a sigh of relief. The humour had washed around her as if the priestess were never there. “Will that persevere? I spoke at great length with your… equerry. He has assured me of his confidence in your cooperation – in the most powerful terms.”

“My _partner,_ ” Yamame corrected. “My partner – and if he has, then I’ll just have to keep his promise, won’t I?”

“It is my hope that you do.”

 _For him if not for you,_ Yamame thought indignantly. She pushed the ugly sentiment out. “So?” she asked. “Can I come in, already?”

Hijiri did not appear to understand. “Pardon me?”

The earth spider motioned upwards – to the leaning _toori_ overhead. “I’m still off the temple grounds, formally,” she pointed out. “I know the compacts of _Gensokyo_. I’m not entering – formally – until I’ve the guarantee nobody should attack me, or my sisters, over our past misunderstanding. I’m here to work, not to fight. I will if I must, of course… but that is bad for architecture.”

The priestess Hijiri’s eyes hardened into polished bronze… then, truth dawning, her shoulders unwound from the rise. “… Yes,” she breathed. “Yes, of course. My mistake. You may enter, as your… sisters may, also. Nor should anyone fight you over any past wrongs as long as your stay – _less_ you start the fight yourselves. This, I promise. The temple, also, stands open to your worship and meditation, should you require.”

“Nicely said, Hijiri,” Yamame laughed as she closed in on the black priestess. “No deal, though. Try again with my sisters, whenever they should show up. Maybe you’ll hook one or two. Not me, though.”

Hijiri’s brows were disapproving. “Custom dictates visitors at least pay their respects to the Buddha before—”

“Not me,” Yamame cut across the reproach. There was only one being who schooled the eldest of earth spiders on the cultural peculiarities of the surface world, and the priestess was not he. “What currency would my worship be, anyway?” she asked, smiling a wry, little smile. “I’m but an earth spider lost to the world. I know only one god, personally – and I found out about him very late.”

“Oh?”

“Never mind, Hijiri. It’s a small, private god – and he only likes earth spiders.” Yamame, coming up within an arm’s reach of the statuesque priestess, stopped and extended a hand. “Very good?”

Byakuren Hijiri’s dark eyes stared at her from unnervingly high above. “… What is this?”

“A ritual,” Yamame explained. “We shake, we say, ‘Very good,’ and then we go to our work. You’ve yours, I’m sure – and I’m itching to start on mine. I’m going to need to see the site, first of all. Did you know? None of your drawings showed how the guest house should stand against the rest of the grounds. I’m going to have to situate it before my sisters get here and start digging. The materials you’ve gotten us, too; I’d like to see what kind of quality we’re to work. I hope you didn’t leave them out in this damp. I’d hate to have to sit on each and every plank until it’s straight again. Well, then?”

For a moment yet, Byakuren Hijiri stared her down.

For a moment, Yamame Kurodani, the yearly malady, fully expected her new employer to renege on their contract. She expected to be cast out once again. She expected her hand to be taken, to be swung around, and hoisted bodily under the _toori_ , out of the holy grounds. She clamped down mentally on the spell which could allow her immediate flight if such were the case. But then…

… But then, miracle of miracles, gods reached out of the temple nearby, and Byakuren Hijiri, master of _Myouren-ji_ , did take her hand. She wrapped her tough, lukewarm fingers around, and squeezed. The squeeze was clumsy, and not a trifle overstrong; and Yamame, mischief treasonously bubbling up, crushed out the urge to see if an earth spider could throw a statue.

“… I’d _been_ wrong,” Hijiri was saying.

Yamame dared a grin. “What had you been wrong about this time?”

The priestess Hijiri’s lips moved. It was a confused moment before Yamame had read this movement.

Byakuren Hijiri _was smiling._

“Never mind,” she black priestess aped Yamame’s earlier line. “It is a small, private mistake. Very good… It is done. Isn’t it?”

“Ye—Yes,” Yamame agreed. “Very good.”

“Well, then.” Hijiri released the spider’s hand. Then, grinding around on one heel, she began to lead further into her domain. “After me,” she called. “I shall myself see to it no mistakes are made. Also, I shall later convey your respects to the Buddha – with apologies. You are here to work, not to fight – past mistakes notwithstanding.”

Against her pride rising hotly to the bait (and her knuckles hotly aching in their joints), Yamame Kurodani _had_ to smile about this outcome. More than hammering out a truce with _Myouren-ji_ ’s master. More than arriving mere minutes from her beloved work.

Yamame Kurodani smiled because it seemed – with almost trivial patency – that “propriety” was not her human’s unique sickness.

* * *


	21. Chapter 21

Six days hence, Hijiri’s guest-house was propped on the edge of completion.

Yamame Kurodani, all tolerantly amused, had allowed the Buddhist priestess to drive her and her crew through the tipping point of the first day. She had listened as the master of _Myouren-ji_ had speechified on her connections with those craftsmen who had piously delivered the materials. She had watched, with somewhat less amusement, how – once arrived – her sisters had been neatly swathed in Hijiri’s authority over the temple grounds; how, in a tone impervious to disobedience, the black priestess had begun to direct the earth spiders around the site: to stack these limbers here, drag those pallets there, don’t open those bags of nails yet, they’ll get lost – and so and such. Yamame’s sisters had suffered it all with spider-nimble dignity. When, however, _Myouren-ji_ ’s rain-jellied soil had begun to fly from their shovels in earnest, solid Hijiri had taken her fill of command, and – in the first instance the spiders weren’t looking – vanished in cloud of different responsibilities.

Work had sped up signally after that; and, by the time the Sun had dipped below the horizon, Yamame Kurodani and her sisters had been sitting in a circle atop the freshly laid foundations – gazing up at the nighting sky, and using outrageously of the rare occasion their eldest was nearby and available for prodding. Questions had been asked. Answers had been given – to some. The rest had been passed over in a giggling accompaniment, or taken to (now slightly distracted) sleep.

News had run, as news do; and by the noon hours of the second day, rumour and noise both had brought in the first eyes curious about the uprising construction. Some of those eyes had belonged to _youkai_ , who openly questioned the earth spiders’ purpose. Yamame had placated each with promises of hot baths – and who knew what other conveniences? – available on the priestess Hijiri’s grant. Other such eyes had been human, and less brave.

It had taken the third day – and its sweltering afternoon – for the first pair of those to outgrow their instinctive caution. Yamame Kurodani had looked on thus (no small trepidation clinching her stomach), even as one of her sisters – whom she had sent to fetch some measuring poles – had been approached by one of those quicker developing gapers-on.

The younger spider – a small, tautly-strung redhead by the name of Nikiba – had been nosing and arming through a pile of mixed-up equipment in search for the poles as the first human – a pale-faced, someway scholarly-seeming male of some age – had shuffled in near. The studious male had asked something unheard… which had caused Nikiba to jump and knock down the very poles she had been seeking – stood in a bunch a little to the side all along. The human had begun to apologise profusely; and yet, even as Nikiba – now red all over from her lapse – had gathered up the tools, a brief conversation had stitched between the two. At its end, the human had nodded sagely at the information he had been offered, and walked away – altogether unharmed.

Nikiba had then to suffer an inglorious return to her sisters’ side… but humans had come in all shapes, sizes and curiosities afterwards.

Three days later, and the object of their gossip was all but ready for a hands-on confirmation.

It was some hours until evening still. Yamame Kurodani, the great architect of the Underworld, had spent the last half of one in fisticuffs with a traditional _Gensokyan_ sliding-panel front door, which – whichever way she pushed – simply refused to retract fully into its designed slot. Unaccustomed to doors which talked back, Yamame had all but taken the offending piece to the saw – until the saw met with and bent on the realisation that they were almost out of pinewood, and the resin used to glue it together had dried up in the late Summer heat. She was considering sawing it anyway when Hachiashi, walking by, turned her thoughts away from domestic violence.

“Going to go kiss up, Yams?”

Her jet-haired sister was chewing on a ball of putty, and pointing.

Yamame, rising from her argument with the door, followed the younger one’s finger. The finger was aimed like the muzzle of a tiny cannon at _Myouren-ji_ ’s black priestess – as ever standing in her slips at the temple’s yawing gate. A figure stood before Hijiri now, however: a tall, male figure, somehow as wide and muscular as the warlike priestess… and poised! The man was visibly offended by whatever words were pouring from Hijiri’s mouth – even though the exact range of his pique was invisible under the black sash wound around his eyes.

Yamame dropped her saw. Then, hopping off the house’s dusty veranda, she began at a slow, guarded walk toward the priestly two.

The man – sensing her perhaps, or taking his fill of Hijiri’s religious rhetoric – bowed stiffly, and turned to walk directly at Yamame.

Yamame’s next pace skipped. She quickened the following to compensate. Then, just to match, she did the next as well. Then the one afterwards. Something cracked inside her; and, before she thought differently, she was running.

She crashed into Paran’s hastily spread arms with a neck-breaking force.

Though nothing in actual broke on her landing; and her human’s wall-like-ness had for once proven it had a use, in addition to its annoyances. There was little wall-like in the way his arms folded down on her shoulder and the small of her back, but… Paran had never been anything else but a web of paradoxes. Yamame had known this. She had more than known this; she had even, very recently, shyly scuffled nearby the idea of accepting it. She hugged him back.

For what seemed a full minute – even if her hemming senses assured otherwise – she was suddenly back inside her warm, underground home. The correlation registered in a less faraway corner of her mind as strange – even wrong. The Yamame feeling at home simply did not care.

But her human was as parti-coloured as he had ever been; and he tore her out of this web as well.

“… How is it going, then?” he asked.

Yamame sighed. “It’s coming along,” she admitted. “Along enough, at any rate. We’ve had some snags and hiccups. All par for course. Why, I was about to absolutely obliterate one of the doors just now, if you’ll believe.”

Paran made a soft, vibrating chuckle. “Sounds tough.”

“Anything but,” corrected Yamame. “Actually, because pinewood is naturally spongy, the frame must have soaked up some of that damp and puffed while it was waiting in storage. That’s _possibly_ why it won’t fit in, even though I’d drawn it out and ordered it myself. I’d even accounted for slight error – but not this much.” She paused. “… Or,” she gave up, “maybe you were only teasing me just now?”

“… Mm.”

The spinstress giggled into her human’s ear. “Snake! What were you talking about with Hijiri, anyway? Something about our payment? It looked like you were about to charge her with fists for a moment. That could have sealed the entire deal – you know?”

“Ah—” Paran tensed uncomfortably. “… No. Well… Not yet. She was— She was trying to _warn me._ ”

“Warn you? About what?”

“About bothering the spiders.”

Yamame Kurodani, the yearly malady, felt a black swirl of resentment coagulate under the skin of her mood. “… I’d _asked her_ not to do that anymore,” she hissed below her nose. “We’ve had human visitors for days. We haven’t even scared off a single one. Are these steps really so necessary? We weren’t going to…” Her anger bled into a rising blister of confusion. “… Hold on,” she told her human. “Why was she warning _you_? You’d spoken for me before, yes? At great length, even – allegedly. Hadn’t you?”

Paran’s long arms wound tighter around her back. Or, it might have been another tensing – and the arms locking was a side symptom only. Any way she diagnosed it, Yamame found she did not mind this illness at all. “… When I ended up here last,” Paran explained, “it was long after Sun-down. I was not wearing the blindfold. The priestess Hijiri meets with petitioners without counting; perhaps my voice has slipped her memory as well.”

“I think she remembers now,” Yamame said.

“How so?”

“She’s staring. Stunned like a bird on a glass window, too.” The spinstress giggled again. “I think I like that look on her face.”

Paran spat a cough. “… Well,” he said, “I’d told her we were partners – but not _this_ close.”

 _Would you tell anyone?_ Yamame quietly wondered. But, circumstance presenting to file Hijiri’s teeth some more, she asked instead, “So? Shall we go and give her an even bigger stone to swallow?”

Paran laughed mysteriously. “I’d love to, Yamame,” he confessed. The phrasing… no, the pick of words had all at once somehow made her forget all about _Myouren-ji_ ’s insufferable master. “I’d love to,” Paran said again (and Yamame’s heart became silly for another second). “But the good priestess isn’t the _only one_ staring.”

A pull of embarrassed panic rode over her pleasant distraction; and Yamame, ripping quite easily out of her human’s embrace, whipped around to match his heading.

Her sisters, dirty over all from the day’s work, were clustered in front of the guest-house. Then, a heartbeat later, and they weren’t clustered anymore; and the earth spiders returned as one to whichever tasks that needed doing yet, with all the dispatch the closing in evening harshly necessitated.

Yamame yelled a few words that weren’t very necessary. Then, she span back to her human.

Paran was standing still, as blind and tight-lipped as was his regular outfit. Only a minuscule jerk of one of his cheeks betrayed he, too, had found Yamame’s little slip all rather precious.

The great architect of the Underworld, Yamame Kurodani, pulled up whatever scraps of her self-regard that remained. “All right,” she said, smacking her hands on her hips. “That little sidelight on Hijiri aside, _you_ need to _get scarce._ As I said – the work’s coming along fine – but we aren’t near enough done yet. That door needs obliterating – and it’s only one nail through this pretty mess. I can’t in good faith go loitering around, so you’re going to have to go about it on your own. Can you do that? A few more hours, and we should be able to put it to some semblance of a finish. I promise.”

Paran bent down in an obedient bow. “Very good.”

“Ask Hijiri after the payment in the meanwhile.”

“Very good.”

“And don’t bother the spiders, either.”

“… Very good.”

Yamame Kurodani, about to re-join with her hard-working sisters, gave her human a last, cool and clinical once-over. He did not appear anything but himself on the outside.

“Paran?” she asked anyway.

“Yes?”

“Why?” she demanded. “I told you seven days. We’ve only been six. I was going to go grab you first thing tomorrow. Why are you here?”

Her human – her favourite, favourite human, whom she would have never switched for any which had come to gawk at the earth spiders before him – slowly unrolled his tactful bow.

His eyes were unreachable under the blindfold; but, even so, Yamame Kurodani had but to look at the bitter warping of his mouth to know the man Paran was none too pleased with his own actions.

“… I guess,” he muttered at length, with rather more tartness than tact, “I guess I missed you.”

* * *

In time, all of Yamame’s promises were fulfilled. The guest-house had slowly but certainly been brought up to a state of usability. The rooms had been cleaned out; the front door – with some negotiation – had been dried, sanded down, and fitted. The veranda – swept clean of dust and waxed to a polish.

For their stainless performance, the earth spiders had been bestowed a pair of honours by _Myouren-ji_ ’s master in advance of their proper reimburse. The lesser of these honours – and one to come later – was the grant of stay within the house’s rooms until the following day. The lesser because – on her insistence not to use of Hijiri’s provisions more than they must – Yamame and her sisters had already been spending their nights inside the unfinished building. The house might be cleaner now, yes; but it was little different to what it had been before, and each of them had known it already by their heart.

The greater of the honours – more immediate and of more interest both – was the leave to trial the baths of the guest house with their own dust-and-plaster-caked bodies, then a humble supper afterwards. The baths had been provided with plumbing of human make, and supplied with water from a newly drilled-out hot spring – located by another of the animalistic server _youkai_ with which Hijiri seemed to surround herself. Thus the earth spiders had tested their own work to the best of their own ability. Then, a fresh change of clothes; and the underground’s builders, steaming and chatting animatedly, gathered in the largest of the house’s rooms, to feast on human-fashion foods of such smells and variety, all but Yamame questioned whether she had affixed the “humble” part of Hijiri’s proclamation on her own. Halfway through the meal, however, the priestess stood up from her seat beside the _Bishamon_ and her attendants; and her intent was made as clear as a dew-spotted web when she launched into a long homily on the core values of Buddhism, and their application for enlightened _youkai._

The many foods kept the younger spiders’ slavering attention leashed tightly to their plates. Not Yamame’s.

The eldest of the spiders had but nibbled a little on the slightly familiar, but all the same foreign cooking, before her mind was somewhere else entirely. A nod to the nearby Hachiashi (unnoticed anyway), and the mother of plagues rose up to leave her sisters alone to their entertainment. Out, and into the sparkly-clean hallway; and soon, she was standing before the door of the tiny bedroom which had been laid aside for her private use for the night.

Yamame Kurodani sucked in a composing breath.

Then, she slid the door open, and firmly stepped inside. She pulled shut, and held the door close, behind her.

In the centre of the room, cross-legged on the brand new floor, the human Paran was calligraphing letters of _Gensokyo_ ’s runic script onto a large, _washi_ paper roll with a long, ornate brush. The room was dim, only the orange glow of lampions outside filtering in through the thin, _shoji_ wall; all the same, the human’s hand inked the shapes onto the paper with the long practice of someone who, in his distaste for shouting, has had to find other ways of communicating his thoughts over long distances.

A stitch of irony, it was still he who spoke first. Though to his credit he did not shout. “I think I’ve figured it out,” he said, never for a little stopping his hand in its work. “Why the priestess Hijiri kept warning everyone not to bother you, I mean – regardless of your requests.”

“Oh?” Yamame said from her position at the door. “Have you? Why’s that?”

“I’ve told you, yes?” Paran replied. “That this – that your work – would be twisted into politics? Well, here it is. The good priestess has shown effectively she can tame the Underworld. At least, she has shown she can control the earth spiders.”

“But that’s simply not true,” Yamame pointed out.

“What does it matter? Word has come out. Who knows?” Paran speculated. “I may be in for competition soon – imagined as it may be.”

Her human chuckled darkly at his own guesswork. Then, he put the brush down carefully, blew a few times on the wet ink, rolled the paper up, and – finally – looked at Yamame.

His eyes squinted for some reason as they walked up her legs. They glided up the airy shorts and shirt she had attired after the bath; they lingered a little as they travelled higher still. Almost, and they would have climbed to the peak at her face… Only then, they darted sharply to the side; and Paran – he who embarrassed earth spiders and lived – looked suddenly very small. He looked heavy, and squashed under said weight; he looked at once on the needle point of breaking, and about to spring up and run. He looked _trapped._

Yamame Kurodani’s spider heart thumped inside its cage.

Not in the slightest because her _youkai_ ’s instincts roused at the sight. Yamame Kurodani’s heart thumped because _the other part of her_ – that which had tasted of human things – roused at it as well.

The yearly malady opened her mouth to speak. The mouth was dry. She closed it, swallowed. Then, she opened it again.

“Paran,” she said, “if you want to, we could—”

“Would you like to go drinking?” Paran spoke over her. “I’ll take you. If you like.”

Yamame’s mind flickered between her previous emotion and her human’s abrupt offering.

After a moment, the latter won out. “You don’t drink, though,” she accused. “Not with me.”

Paran squirmed, seeming somehow to become even heavier in the process. “… I’ll drink,” he surrendered. “I’ll make an exception. All right?”

“And where did you want to go?”

“Somewhere in town,” he replied, a touch too fast to Yamame’s ear. “I’ve asked around. There are a few places we could go.”

“Could we?” Yamame’s brows met above her nose. “I’d thought the Human Village was closed to us _youkai_. More than that, I’m from the Underworld. Wouldn’t I get exterminated on sight? I could do without that tonight.”

Paran bit off a muffled curse. “That’s not what it’s—” He choked back his first response, and groaned. “I’ve asked around, Yamame. There _are_ places. Safe ones. As long as you… As long as _we_ behave ourselves. I wouldn’t have mentioned it if…”

Her human’s voice trailed off. Yamame felt a throb of guilt inside her chest. “All right, look,” she said, by way of apology, “if you want to drink, then we can drink here. Give me a minute, and I’ll go fetch us something. We’ve gotten some _habushu_ , and I think plum wine, from visitors from your… town. I don’t know why, exactly, but—”

“It’s favours,” Paran grunted. “It’s favours, Yamame. They brought gifts, because you’d submitted to Hijiri, and were doing her flock a service. It’s custom to return these.”

“I’d thought Buddhists abstained from drink.”

“Maybe they were bribing you to stay away, then,” Paran joked impatiently. He waited, but the earth spider didn’t laugh. “… Sorry,” he sighed. “Very good. We’ll do as you like, Yamame.”

“Will we?”

Her human looked up. He looked back down just as soon; but Yamame hadn’t failed to catch the tracing of a resigned smile.

“Trust me,” said Paran.

Yamame considered the options sat down on the floor in front of her.

( ) Go out.  
( ) No need to go out.


	22. A date?

(X) Go out.

A sprinkling of footfalls stole into the hall outside the door. Yamame allowed them to coast her thoughts over. The steps faded in, large room-wise; they passed by, very close, all furtive _tap-tap-tap_ of naked feet on wooden floor. Then, as they had in, they faded out – slinking down the hallway until vanished.

Yamame Kurodani, the eldest and most feared among earth spiders, released the door she had been, until now, holding shut tightly behind her back. Then, she let her arms hang flatly along her sides.

It did not matter, ultimately, which way she took her human’s proposition, so long as neither of them lacked for a drink in their hand at the end. Though Yamame may have preferred to warm the insides of her creation for a while more; and yet, if she had to leave it unattended for a portion of the evening, how much would that weight on leaving it entirely in Hijiri’s care in the morning? Yamame’s heart was saying, “A lot.” But her heart was stupid, and could be diverted to other concerns; and if the nearest of those would much rather dull his senses with alcohol in friendlier environs than these: inside a foreign temple, encircled on all sides by earth spiders and other _youkai_ , locked in a tiny, cramped bedroom with she whom fearful they had long ago styled the mother of plagues…

… Then, it was a very small thing for Yamame to go along with his wishes.

“All right,” she said, mock-mercifully. “Very good, Paran. Your town it is.”

Her human, Paran – whom she wished nothing more but to pull up encouragingly and embrace – pulled himself up to a stand quite unrequiring of her help. He breathed out explosively; and – for the first time since she had entered the room – he looked fully into her spider’s eyes. The look was filled with relief. Then, forcing it awfully, Paran pulled a sardonic smile.

The smile was filled with self-loathing.

In a single, glaring moment of insight, Yamame Kurodani – she who could read the geometrics of building, but not her favourite human – remembered where she had seen this trapped set of Paran before. She understood, in the same moment, why her spider’s heart had reacted to seeing him so the way it had. For Yamame Kurodani, the yearly malady, could recall of only one instance she and her human had been woven in a like circumstance; and it was indeed that evening a score of evenings ago, when – confined similarly in Yamame’s bedroom – the two of them had first grudgingly brushed up against the idea of _touching each other_ without either of them succumbing to hysterics. The idea had outspanned what Yamame had sensed either of their estimations; and it had soon greedily swelled into something that she had, afterwards, felt had been rather less than innocent.

At least, it had been un-innocent enough to cause her human to lose out on his sleep subsequently.

In that above flash of insight, Yamame Kurodani understood the sublime tragedy of him, who called himself ‘Paranseberi.’ For what the spiders’ envoy was attempting to escape were not the _youkai_ -ruled walls of _Myouren-ji_ , nor were it the temple’s black priestess, whom the man sorely mistrusted. It weren’t the spiders themselves, housed nearby, whose whimsy was impossible to divine – nor even their eldest, who was even nearer, and infinitely more deadly.

What Paran _was_ running from – was _himself._

Less poetically, what Yamame’s favourite human was running from was not she, but rather _the circumstance_ – wherein he had trapped himself by selfishly overtaking their agreed schedule. All, because – by his own confession – he couldn’t bear to go one more day without her legs. Or her neck. Or her hair. Or, a yearning thought suggested itself, perhaps _just Yamame in general._

The thought lit up a hot blush under her cheeks. Yamame smothered it below as much web as she could spew mentally at a short notice. The dim lighting inside the room must have helped; and when Paran had approached, he showed awareness of anything but blushes.

“… Very good,” he said, confidence half-remounted in his voice. “Then get dressed, Yamame. I’ll wait… outside. I need a few cups of fresh air before you drink me under the bench.”

 _Wouldn’t you get those anyway while we walk there?_ Yamame wondered. Then, something else caught in the net between her ears.

“I am dressed, though,” she noticed.

“Then dress more,” Paran insisted.

“What for?” Yamame demanded. “Are you worried I’ll fall ill? If so, quit. I’m a _youkai_. More than that, I’m an earth spider who controls diseases. I know – I’ve asked you to forget this as often as you can. It’s still very real, though. What would that make me, then, if I somehow fell with an illness myself? I’d be the butt of jokes in the Capital for the next hundred years. So no, I’m not going to fall ill, if I can help it. And I _can_ help it – you know? That’s what makes me… well, me.”

“Yamame…”

“Yes. That’s me. What?”

Paran _rumbled._ Then, in an after-quake, one of his hands rose up and gripped the bridge of his big nose. “… Yamame,” he murmured. “Can you face some unpleasant facts?”

“Must I?”

“Yes,” said Paran. The hand came away, and a less crooked copy of the sour smile from earlier shaped on his mouth. “… You’re very pretty.”

The blush, which Yamame had thought under control, flared and erupted all over her face. She tried to mask it with a chuckle. “Ah— Well, Ashi has criticised me for this before. Yes? She says I’m… She says I’ve got… That my… Well, she says a lot of things – you know?”

“I’ll let my god sort out Hachiashi,” Paran promised. “That’s not my point. My point is, other… other _people_ are going to look at you.”

“So? Humans can’t sense what I am in this form, unless they search specifically. Won’t they assume I’m simply another human if they just look?”

“They will.”

“What’s so dangerous, then? Why do I need to dress more?”

“… Would you be grossly upset if I said propriety?”

“Yes,” Yamame replied. “Well, no. Maybe not _grossly._ ”

“… All right, then. Another way.” Paran reached out with his big hands, and patted them down on each one of her shoulders. His brows bunched up belligerently. “I’ve worked for you, Yamame,” he told her, in that saccharine tone he sometimes used. “I’ll say this, because I promised you I would lie less, but only once. I’ve worked _a lot_ for you. So, if I can help it, then I’m not going to share you. And, right now, Yamame,” he added, “right now, I am trying to help it. So dress more.”

Ahead she may so much as sketch a thought on the blank sheet of lambskin that was her mind right then, the human’s cool hands slid wistfully along her uncovered arms, down and down, until her elbows. Then, they stopped.

And then, when it appeared most he had something else wholesale planned for the silly earth spider, Paran sighed…

… And softly, but firmly, moved Yamame out of the way.

It was no time… or it might have been all time, or perhaps it was nonsense to guess the time without her bedroom’s clock ticking out the arbitrary intervals… between when her human had quit the room, and when Yamame’s legs folded up underneath her.

She was upset.

Not _grossly_ so, if anyone asked… but nobody did, and Yamame Kurodani, she who had been prized by the Oni for her sunny disposition, suddenly wished _something_ smeared for a mile across the surrounding landscape. It could have been the door. It could have been the room in its cramped entirety; it could even have been her human, had Yamame not known perfectly it would have done nothing to mend his stubbornness.

Most of all, what Yamame Kurodani wanted fanged and pumped tight with volatile contagions – was herself.

Not because Yamame had missed _some_ manner of opportunity here with her human. Time would be later to pursue these again. After all, inside the cracks between their jobs, all the two of them had was time. Nor was the mother of plagues upset because her own claims of exclusivity to her human had had their cloaks turned against her. Her sisters had always done the same implicitly, whenever all of them were gathered in one place. Paran’s claim on her had been no different.

And yet, someway, _it had been_ ; and it had made such a stupid grin crawl out and stick on her stupid face, Yamame Kurodani wanted said face dragged out, strung up, and slingshot at the Moon.

That she couldn’t go through with this plan was the upsetting part. She needed her face, in spite of its foolishness – if for nothing else, then to keep her human’s compliments valid. She gave it a disciplinary smack, and that had to do.

Then, drawing on her previous experiences, Yamame Kurodani climbed up from the spotless floor, and set about deciding a change of clothes that would at once satisfy her human’s waspish propriety, and leave it a little unsatisfied.

* * *

Her human was waiting outside – not immediately, but under the temple’s _toori_ – gazing out into the darkness blanketing the fields beyond the tree line. The temple grounds, at this late hour, were still and lifeless, but for the noise emitting from the guest-house, where proceedings (or proc- _eat_ -ings) were still in merry headway. Yamame made across the empty courtyard in a hurry, conspicuous in the murky light of the lanterns.

As the spinstress – who had chosen a set of loose-fitting, earthen overalls to wrap up her legs, but had kept her arms mostly on display – obviously approached, Paran swivelled on a heel to meet her. He absorbed her outfit at a glance – then again, and once more; and though she span in front of him daringly, grinning all the while, in the end, these plain clothes were deemed serviceable.

“Serviceable,” said Paran, confirming what his expression had broadcast already. “Shall we?”

Yamame quit spinning, and gave an assenting nod. Paran drew his own clothes about his wide shoulders, and began walking. Yamame followed.

Inside the minute, they had breached the thin, natural boundary of the woods, and emerged onto one of the many dirt highways which partitioned the farmland. Paran said nothing as he picked one between the three snaking outwards in separate directions, but, Yamame reasoned, if anywhere a human’s sense of direction should be superior to hers, it should be on this artificial terrain. They walked on, until another crossroads loomed out of the night. Paran, unerringly, chose again.

Her human kept himself cloaked in his quiet, even as a long road unfurled before them – seeming to go on and on, even to Yamame’s preternatural sight. All the same, she did not speak. She did not try to strike a conversation. They would talk later, anyhow; for now, something else was vying for her full attention.

Yamame had not expected the fields to be _so loud._

She had walked the forests of the surface world at night before, had Yamame Kurodani, and those had been rightly alive with sound. Any slight exhalation of the wind would startle a murmur from the millions of leaves; any small prey scurrying through the brush would disturb the undergrowth noisily. A branch snapped underfoot would cast a dry _crack_ to echo on for hours – two, she amused inside, could probably carry on till morning. The soundscape of a forest at night was a rainbow cacophony; even with her keen spider’s hearing, Yamame had imagined these man-made fields to be as quiet as the dead passages of the Underworld compared.

They were not.

A buzzing fly-cloud of sounds hung over the manufactured flats. To either side of the road fat crickets were grating out their single-note symphonies; in the rice fields farther out, small amphibians were splashing around, going to and from their nightly business. A lake of green-gold barley came next; and here, the hairy stalks seemed to sigh in delight as they rubbed on each other in the breeze. A bird – or otherwise small avian – which the earth spider had never heard before, was making home among them, _creep-creep_ ing lustily as if to fit in. And, over all, the low wheezing of unrestrained wind.

Yamame walked on, in a surprised wonder, head snapping left and right in response to the alien sounds.

Almost, and she would have bowled over Paran when the man suddenly stopped, not twenty minutes later. With an even greater surprise, Yamame realised the walls of the Human Village – backed by a nimbus of orange light – were now faintly visible.

“Yamame,” Paran was saying. “When you took me down to your Capital…”

“Yes?” Yamame asked. “I remember. What about it?”

Her human, mouth inched open to tell her what, turned about to face her. And yet, whatever the “what” had been, it must have been lost easily. Paran closed his mouth, shut his eyes, and shook his head. Then, he opened them again. “… I want to hold your hand,” he told her simply. “That’s all.”

“Oh.”

This piece of spider wisdom let fly, Yamame offered up a hand. Her human wrapped it promptly up in his; but where the spinstress would have thought it done, Paran began toying around with her slighter digits… until – somehow, someway – they ended up laced together with his own.

Thusly was the human Paran appeased; and Yamame, her hand very warm, spent the remainder of the walk in a different wonder altogether.

As the walls of the Human Village slid ever closer, however, a less preoccupied aspect of her mind spooled out into activity. In passing, the architect Yamame noted the walls which hedged the humans’ dwell from all sides were not very high. They were easy enough on the eye, for being walls – topped all along with a cute miniature of the terracotta roofs which most of the houses in town wore atop – but not very high. Any _youkai_ possessed of enough faculties to speak might persuade its body to simply fly over; a human – with long enough legs and a drop of spider blood in their veins – was like to clamber to the other side without too much trouble. Maybe then, Yamame guessed, the walls had not been designed to keep intruders out, but to contain the human numbers within.

The gatehouse was a different story by half. Yamame had witnessed the gate in its open state, six days before; now, the soaring arch was occupied not by fluttering wards or colourful banners, but filled out with a sheer, iron-studded slab of weather-beaten wood. The planks of which the slab consisted appeared to go on unbroken the entire way to the roof of the arch. Yamame shuddered picturing the sweat and blood gone into lumbering a tree so massive.

A secondary door had been worked into the vast wings of the gate, and it was now on that door that Paran knocked – four times in a sequence. A stretched moment later, the door squeaked ajar on rust-splotched hinges, and another human – a bland-faced male in a padded tunic – peered out the gap.

“We’re from the temple,” Paran told the watchman.

The man behind the door mulled it over. “All right,” he decided. “Come on through, then. Quickly! I’ve a bottle of good _umeshu_ going on a _Shōgi_ match. Can’t miss it.” He slammed the door and keyed the lock once Paran had shoved himself and Yamame through. “What’re your names?”

“Paranseberi,” Paran replied. “Yamame.”

“Paransaba…” the watchman struggled.

“Paran.”

“All right. _Paran, Yamame._ ‘Case you’re going back and no one’s at the post, there’ll be a list a’ names nailed to the gate. Cross yourselves out. And don’t leave the door bangin’. Got it?”

“Very good.”

“Good evenin’.”

Foregoing any and all “good evenin’s” may have been coming back to him, the watchman disappeared inside a nearby house. A light was on behind the window. A roar of mockery rocked the glass inside the frame moments later. Someone, earmarks were, had just lost rights to a bottle of good _umeshu_.

“Coming?”

Paran was looking down at her inquiringly. Yamame smiled, and sketched a shrug. “Must have been a loaded match.”

“Mhm.” He gave her palm a brief squeeze. “Let’s go.”

And so they did – and he led her deeper into the humans’ uncharted world.

Yamame Kurodani’s first sentiment regarding the Human Village was that of smug validation. Her second such sentiment was of disappointment.

Here was a place built indeed by imprecise human hands; and though skill and care had marked themselves in these buildings, Yamame’s trained eyes at once drew a bitter parallel between this place and the faraway Oni Capital. Yes, streets were wider in the world above – fivefold Yamame and her human may walk hand in hand and never bother anyone; and yet the side alleys, snaking off either side of the thoroughfare as means of reaching individual homes, were as narrow and needlessly winding as those in the underground city. As well the homes themselves sweetened the overall impression – and they were pretty homes, and no mistake. Those roofs, for one, were _absolutely gorgeous._

All the same, Yamame Kurodani couldn’t swallow down the disappointment in her chest. Might be her unfamiliarity was speaking, too; but – for some strange reason – she couldn’t moult the impression the buildings staring after her with their dark windows were different in some way from those described in the books, which her human had diligently procured for her study. Older, perhaps – less complex. More uniform. An effect of necessity, not art, taken for granted – rather than purposefully preserved.

Where the Oni trivially lacked for care in their architectural slant, humans – ostensibly – had an even deadlier illness plaguing their craft.

These (and other) thoughts evaporated from her head when Paran drew her up the short flight of stairs before one of the few houses that weren’t dark. He opened the front-facing door with an almost habituated jerk, and motioned her through.

A familiar scene visited itself on Yamame’s spider eyes and ears.

The floor of this house closest to ground had been ceded to an open taproom – so open, it spanned the entire width of the building. A thick trace of burnt pine resin clung to the air, already lousy with other scents – though no open fire was in evidence. The floor was raw wood, buffed from use, and dry rushes; and it was packed to the fringes of chaos with drinkers. Males and females – human – sat in twos, fours, even sixes, at rough-hewn tables: drinking and talking, boasting and laughing, and doing such an expert impression of a typical Oni drink-house that Yamame searched around for hallmarks of a brawl about to splinter the first chairs and chip the first teeth.

Paran was scanning around as well. “Crowded tonight,” he opined.

Yamame giggled at the scathing review. “I’ve passed out in worse. Are we going to sit?”

“I’m looking.”

Nor was he lying. Yamame allied her efforts to his.

At length (of looking past mostly overflocked tables), her sharp spider’s eyes identified one possibility. At the far end of the taproom, all but inside the loneliest corner, a single townswoman in pretty robes was occupying a table much too spacious for one. The woman was drinking, as was well in the place – nursing a solitary care over a tall glass of colourful mixture, eyes secreted from the surrounding world under a fringe of close-cut, crimson-red hair. The other side of her table was waiting empty – if uninviting.

“Yamame?”

Paran nudged her out of her staring. He himself was staring, as she found out – somewhere off in the opposite direction – but none of it had stopped him.

“What?”

“Over there.” He jabbed his chin out. “That. Isn’t that…?”

Startled, Yamame Kurodani followed her human’s frowning. On its point, over by another wall of the taproom, a table of four was sitting, up to their noses in beer-foam and conversation. Three among these four were human and male, and paying an undivided court to the remaining fourth. The fourth herself was smaller, longer-haired, and visibly female… even if there was scarce little womanhood filling out the golden, fish-scale dress which, despite all, still gleamed fabulously in the overworked light every time its owner called a toast.

Yamame hissed.

“Ashiii—”

Paran spat a chuckle at her reaction. “Isn’t it just?”

“It’s her all right.” The elder earth spider stamped her foot. “I _gave_ her that dress, you know! No, hold on. This is the Human Village. What is she doing here?!”

“The same thing as you?”

Yamame punched him in the side.

“Oof.”

“You were saying something?” she asked him.

“… We’ll do as you like, Yamame.”

 _But please don’t punch anyone else,_ went unspoken.

( ) The red woman.  
( ) The golden sister.


	23. A date? Cont.

(X) The red woman.

Nor was she on the way to.

As well, then, that she stitched around anything that might bounce her back. Hachiashi – in her cups and showing off – was just such a thing.

“Never mind her,” said Yamame. “I’ve had enough of Ashi in the past six days to tide me over for the next six. _Months,_ that is.” She flicked her unoccupied hand, instead, somewise toward the red townswoman’s spot. “We can sit there. There’s an empty bench by that table in the corner. That’ll do, won’t it?”

Paran’s forehead wrinkled critically. “There’s someone there.”

“We’ll squish in.”

“… What?”

Yamame giggled. “I kid. The bench _opposite_ of her. That one’s empty. I bet if I grease her just right, she’ll even let us put out drinks down on the table, too.”

Her human shrugged his surrender. “We’ll do as you—”

“As I like,” agreed Yamame. “Yes. Well, let’s pick up those drinks, then. We’ll have more of an argument with some in hand, too.” She looked up at him and smiled. “You are buying, of course. Me, I haven’t seen a coin of our money since you swiped it from our previous payment. You didn’t spend it all on that ribbon you got me – did you?”

“No.” Paran smiled faintly back. “Not quite all.”

Yamame winked. “Good human. Come on, then.”

She began dragging him along for the bar. Paran coughed at her back.

“Ah— Yamame? One thing.”

The spinstress quit pulling on his arm and twirled around. Her human stitched out another dim smile. Then, slowly, he lifted up their still-laced-together hands until they hovered between them. His long fingers opened out – then closed, then splayed out again, in a mute display of helpless captivity.

With a pout, Yamame unlocked her own, smaller fingers.

“… Snake.”

Paran, never deflecting the allegation, nodded his thanks instead; both hands unobstructed, he dug under a half of his cloak. A grope or two after, and out produced a small, leathern pouch – held secure on a loop of thong, and heavy to the point of sagging with coin. Yamame’s human, emboldened perhaps by his evident wealth, then headed for the bar quite by himself. Yamame, shoving her now oddly lonely hand down a pocket of her overalls, trailed behind.

The barkeep’s heavily-browed eyes walked them all across the taproom. The ageing man behind the counter, Yamame now saw, must at one point in his life have been infected with a unique sort of illness; he suffered, even now, from its consequences, which – curiosity of curiosities – manifested in his chewing something on the inside of his stubbly cheeks relentlessly, even as he greeted his newest patrons. At the keep’s back, a tall cupboard – laded under a rainbow showcase of varying glass vessels – was reaching up to the naked beams of the ceiling. As Paran exchanged pleasantries, Yamame slid her gaze up the tiers of the collection – until it stuck on the highest shelf, where a row of vacant, print-press-labelled bottles was proudly exhibited. She tried to read the washed-out lettering, but the script gave up no sense to her any way she tackled it. _What’s that all about?_ Her human could likely explain what these meant were she but to ask – but that would spoil the mystery of it.

“Any preferences?” Paran asked after making one order.

Yamame, perplexed as she was, only replied, “I’ll trust you.”

“Very good. Another one, then,” her human told the barkeep.

She continued to silently question the alien bottles as long as their drinks were poured.

Once they had been, and Paran was burdened with two tankards of – she thought – overly frothy ale in addition to being the speaker for the hated earth spiders, Yamame forded a path between the crowded tables toward the one they wanted. Almost at the goal, she cautioned back at her human:

“Now let me do the speaking. OK? Maybe try to make those glasses look heavier than they are, if you can. Very good?”

“Very good,” Paran complied.

“Watch and learn.” Yamame swished to a stop at the solitary townswoman’s table. Then, leaning down, she touched a palm atop it – just inside the woman’s field of view. She _ahem_ ed politely. “Hello. Could I have a moment, please?”

The woman’s head pivoted up with an unwillingness that rivalled the rusted-through door in the town’s great gate.

The fringe of concealing hair parted before one tired hand; and out from under the scarlet curtain issued a pair of chromatically likewise eyes. The woman’s mouth opened. Yamame noted the ruby glitter of blood from a bitten lip on the teeth. Her surface designation, it seemed, stretched a little farther than Yamame had measured at first.

“… What do you want?”

She had not released it with overmuch enthusiasm, but the red woman had a low, pleasantly breathy voice. Yamame Kurodani smiled the friendliest smile in her repertoire. The smile tore along the edge on the woman’s decidedly un-friendly stare, but the spinstress held it up like a battered shield.

“Nothing too much,” she assured. “I hope, anyway. A seat. Me and my partner here, we got our drinks before we could sit down, and by the time we went about it, there was nowhere to even ask – except here. This side of the table’s free, isn’t it? Could we?”

The red woman scowled. “… I’m _waiting_ for someone.”

“No worries. We’ll make ourselves sparse once they arrive. Maybe some other table will have cleared by then. Well?”

She scowled on for a while yet, the red woman did, until the sheer brightness of Yamame’s smile burned a hole through the cloth of her defences. She rubbed at the corners of her eyes; then, switching targets, she levelled her glare at something behind the earth spider. Yamame peeked over her shoulder. Paran’s eyes snapped up to her face. Then, to the woman seated on the bench. Then, back to Yamame.

As though recalling something important, the human drooped suddenly almost halfway to the rush-strewn floor. The foam atop the twin tankards swayed precariously; and Paran groaned mightily like an old oak as he heaved himself up to full height again.

“Oof,” he complained.

The red woman made a sigh. She scratched irritably under the tall collar of her robe.

“Comedians,” she grumbled. “Fine. Sit. What do I care?”

Yamame squealed. “Thank youuu!” She stepped over the ungraciously granted bench and sat down. “Your dress is beautiful, by the way. A _yu-kata_ , right? The blue and red really go with your hair. What’s your name?”

“Don’t talk to me.”

“Grumpy, this one,” Yamame commented to her human. She gestured him to sit as well. “I’m calling her Grumpy. What do you think?”

“Uh-huh,” said Paran. He slammed the tankards down.

“I don’t care,” said Grumpy.

And that effectively seamed that.

* * *

This, newest acquaintance sealed – sealed _away,_ if nothing else – Yamame Kurodani rethreaded her attention with more liquid matters.

Yamame’s human, once planted beside her on the bench, rotated one of the tankards handle-wise toward the spinstress, and pushed it out, until she grabbed at it and took it away. The drinks – and Yamame did not preclude a divine interference in this – had someway retained their full caps of hissing white foam, even throughout Paran’s loose interpretation of her advice. The drink beneath was a vivid brown of damp tree-bark. Yamame dipped an experimental finger in the foam. She licked it down. The taste, at first, was hoppy and bitter over all; but then, a sweeter after-note misted up inside her mouth, and Yamame’s enthusiasm was fully piqued.

Paran, who had watched her put these cautious steps forward, asked her from the side, “How is it, then?”

Yamame wiped the sticky finger on her overalls. “We’ll find out in full measure in a bit,” she told him. “Anyway, say. Are there any… mm, rituals, for before drinking, here?”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, you know – like, where we live, the… um.” Yamame glanced sidelong warily. Huddled on the opposite edge of the table, Grumpy – hands joined into a steeple in front of her ruddy eyes – appeared to have forgotten either of them had ever existed in any perceivable manner. All the same, an earth spider erred always on caution’s side. “Where we live, our… our big friends, they have these things. These things, like, when they throw their cups down after the first sip. Only then they go on to drink normally – from new ones. I think it’s supposed to stand for something. I couldn’t tell you what, though; I could never catch any sober enough to tell me while I still remembered.”

Paran’s expression curdled a little. “I don’t know that the proprietor would agree.”

“That’s why I asked if you had any ideas. I’m not a… well, one of our big friends,” Yamame closed up lamely. “I’ll content myself with fitting in. I just want to know how.”

“… Hmm.” Paran tapped on the thick handle of his tankard pensively for a moment or two. “A friend of mine did use to do this thing,” he then admitted. “He would shoo us away our glasses, until it was decided _to what_ we were drinking that day. He would let us drink then, but not before.”

Once again, Yamame Kurodani clamped down on the unaccountable ache of hearing her human speak on _friends_ of his that weren’t her. Almost, and she would have mistaken this as the first time such an emotion had stuck in her heart; but it wasn’t, and she clamped down even harder so. She kept her efforts overlaid by an indulging smile. “… What did you drink to, usually?”

“This is the queer part,” said Paran. “Nothing much elaborate. Weather, health, luck. Whatever occurred, so the rest of us could get to our drinks quicker in fact.” His shoulders lifted sarcastically. “But he was bigger than any of us, and took his drinking at importance.”

“Anything more… general? Something you _do,_ perhaps?”

“Ah. Well… There is this.”

Paran gripped the handle of his tankard fully around, and raised it up. At his nodded behest, Yamame did the same. Then, Paran’s arm slithered deftly under hers; it looped around, until they were coiled together – like the links of an especially soft chain. The spinstress nonetheless found it easy to access her drink; though she nursed no illusion the pose would become tiresome soon, if kept up.

“And then we take the first sip,” explained her human. “Only one, usually. And we don’t throw.”

Yamame chuckled her relief. “And what does this stand for, again?”

“Who can say?” Paran made a careful shrug. “It’s a ritual. It probably has no meaning.”

“ _Some_ of our rituals do mean things,” Yamame pointed out. “Or do they?”

The question dangled between them on a fine string, until Yamame herself did not know why she’d asked it to begin with.

At length, Paran blew it aside with a sigh. “… Yes,” he granted. “Yes, Yamame. They do. Though this—” he looked to his drink meaningfully, “I cannot speak for this. I just don’t know. Sorry.”

“That’s fine,” Yamame excused him. “And you’re fine, too. Never mind that.” She gave her human another smile. “Well, then? To what?”

Paran rolled his eyes. “Spare me.”

“Why?” she moaned. “I said I wanted to fit in. This is all you gave me to work with. It’s not really my fault if I use it, is it? Or,” she speculated, her lips quirking down, “is it too difficult to come up with anything when it’s with me?”

Her favourite human made a pained sound. “… That’s not it.” He fixed the hold on his tankard. “Yes, I’ve never drunk with you before now. I realise. I had a reason.”

“But you drank with Ashi.”

“I had _a reason,_ ” Paran insisted.

Yamame frowned. She irrationally disliked the word. “And what’s that supposed to be?”

“You’ll figure it out,” her human told her. “You’ll figure it out, Yamame – if you think on it a little.” Then, before she could actually do think at any length, he pushed forward a suggestion. “Confusion to Hijiri?”

That, despite the swelling irritation, set her to giggling again. “I don’t know! She hasn’t paid us yet, has she? Would that be wise?”

Paran made a grimace. “My arm’s getting tired, Yamame.”

“Oh, well. Very good. Confusion to Hijiri, then.”

As one, they leaned in, and drank of the frothy ale.

Yamame’s favourite human – who had disengaged from his tankard with a full set of wizened white moustache – discreetly unlooped their arms, even as Yamame rolled the drink appraisingly in her mouth. Her initial impression had not lied, and the drink was hoppy first of all; but here as well, the sweet, fruity after-taste – even more pronounced in the liquid than it had been in the foam – was in full and delightful evidence. Yamame swallowed it down and purred happily.

“All good?” Paran asked. He had watched her reactions this time as well. “Old ‘keep here,” he went on at her nod; “he orders strong barley wine from the brewers, but waters it down and puts slices of dried apples in a few weeks before serving. That’s the sweet after you are tasting.”

“It’s _delicious!_ ” Yamame chirped. “A mite weaker than I’ve been used to – but a looot smoother. It goes down so easily! Those apples are a streak of genius.” The spinstress touched her tankard fondly, like she would an old friend. “A lot cooler than I’d expected, too. I wonder how.”

“Ah!” Paran snapped his fingers. “That, I do know.”

Yamame smiled even wider, and propped her chin on her hands. “Tell.”

She watched, happy all over, as her human drew once more from his own drink. Then, putting it down, he began to trace meaningless shapes in a wet patch on the table. “There is a fitting under the bar,” he explained, “with pipes which go down into the cellar, where the kegs are stored. The barkeep steps on a pedal for a small bellows, which are under the floor; this pushes air down one of the pipes, which is plugged into to a keg. The keg is air-tight, so the pressure pumps the drink out the other opening, which goes into the other pipe. That comes back up to the tap.”

“Clever,” Yamame approved.

“Convenient,” agreed Paran. “Anyway, the kegs – those ones that are connected at the time – are stored inside a casket filled with ice. That is how the drinks are so cool.”

Yamame was surprised. “Ice? It’s not even the end of Summer. Where did they get ice?”

“And therein’s another convenience. See, they do not _collect_ the ice. They make it. A vat is filled with clear ground water, and they mix in a certain white powder… which I cannot in honesty tell you what it is. They use it for pyrotechny, as well – in fireworks and such.”

“Saltpetre,” guessed the earth spider. “Stands to reason. It is made from… Um. Never mind what it’s made from. Go on.”

Paran lifted a brow at her questioningly, but continued, “All right. Well, they pour it in the vat. The whole bog steams for a good time; but afterwards, the water is left a cold slurry. They add in saw-dust, and it all becomes a kind of iced mud that refuses to melt. They pack it into caskets, chisel out a slot for the keg, and store it all in a cellar. This slows the melting even further. I am told, if the casket is kept closed at all times – less when switching out the kegs – it can last weeks, or even months. All in the name of removing the coin from honest folks, who would prefer the poison they pour down their throats leastwise take away some of the Summer’s heat.” He sniffed. “It’s all very tragic when you boil it down.”

“… Paran?”

“Yes?”

Yamame Kurodani did not answer immediately. She reached out, and absently peeled the foam-moustache from under her human’s nose with the back of her hand.

“I like it so much when you talk to me,” she told him.

Nor did the human reply at first. No. Only he stared on, unblinking, on the silly, old earth spider, who – for some unknowable reason – treasured him above every other human there was. A pale, red flush was working up his jaw; and, Yamame thought, it was too early yet for the drink to have been the source.

“… I’m—” Paran said reluctantly, “I’m bad. With words.”

“No.” Yamame shook her head. “No. When you do get into it, you’re good. Very, _very_ good.”

“Well,” Paran breathed, “I didn’t—”

Across the table, the hitherto quiet Grumpy hawked _tumultuously._ She straightened up, groaned, and gulped down what had come up, with no less noise. Then, she went right back to steepling.

Yamame’s favourite human, now fully a-blush, cleared out his own throat. Although, in his defence, his had not been nearly so clogged. His stare darted to the wet smear on the table.

“… Well,” he murmured. “… Right?”

Yamame Kurodani, whose own cheeks wondrously kept from smoking, made a shy nod. “Mhm,” she conceded. “Right…”

And so they drank, for a time, in embarrassed silence – inasmuch, anyway, as silence may survive in any place of drinking and surfeit for long.

Nor did it. And it was again a male voice, which minutes later tugged their heads back up to attention.

“Seki,” said the voice.

Though not Paran’s; nor even did it belong to the hoary barkeep. Yamame Kurodani looked, then, beside their table – where saw yet another human standing in wait.

At once her spinstress’s eyes were drawn to the sleeves of the arrival’s spacious robe: many-layered, each one cut shorter than the one below; and varicoloured – each framed in a different hue: red, green and yellow, going inwards. On the outside, the newcomer wore a plain, woollen cape, as long as the knees, designed to keep the weather off at the cost of appearance.

“Seki,” he let out his voice again.

Yamame’s eyes startled farther up. The arrival’s face was messy, unshaved. Its features were crooked faintly into a mocking – and visibly habituated – set of a man whose heart has, across his life, learned to distil cynicism into lifeblood. His eyes were dark – circled with shadows – and…

… And they were trained exclusively on the red woman on the other side of the table.

“Sekibanki,” the man spoke for the third time, with a note of defeated finality.

As though only then registering her company had gained up, the red-headed woman lifted her glass – and flushed the remaining contents down her gullet in a single, almost barbarous dip.

She _thunk_ ed her glass down. Then, she glared up at the newcomer.

“… You are _late._ ”

The man spread out his wide-sleeved arms. Then, quickly, he covered them up again, as if the gesture had been entirely unwitting. “Ceremony prolonged. My Lady’s thought. Not mine.” He nudged his head, never looking, in the direction of Yamame and her human. “Your friends?”

Grumpy (or was Sekibanki her real name?) scowled hideously. “I don’t have those.”

She shuffled out to the end of the bench, and stood up.

“Sekibanki?” the robed man questioned.

“My place,” Grumpy (?) growled at him, clawing under her collar. “I’ve had it with _people_ tonight.”

“And drinks?”

“ _Sake_ can be taken warm. I have some left over. Shut up and _walk._ ”

And then, neither of them so much as acknowledging anyone else than one another, they weaved across the taproom, and out the exiting door.

At the utmost moment, as her glowering scarlet hair winked out behind the frame, something – something insubstantial, but vital all the same – seemed to flake away from “Sekibanki’s” blood-red core; and Yamame recognised all at once who – what – the lonely townswoman had truly been, all along. The door slammed shut behind her, frightening the nearby patrons.

Yamame Kurodani, the great architect of the Underworld – and she who had seldom been ignored so utterly prior to tonight – twisted around to look at her own, less messy human.

Paran, though he hadn’t to twist like she had, looked right back at her.

“… We’ve interrupted something,” he guessed, “haven’t we?”

“How do you figure?” asked Yamame.

“I have a hunch.”

The spinstress giggled at the reply. “Snake! I was joking, you know? I’m not that silly. Yes, I guess we have. A little late to apologise now. On the bright side, they left us the table. What sort of clothes were those, anyway? On the human, I mean.”

Paran’s brows scrunched up. “… ‘The human?’”

“The male,” Yamame clarified. “The female – Grumpy? – she was a _youkai_. I’m not sure what kind, but… she was. I hadn’t noticed myself, until just now.” She smiled. “Someone was distracting me, I think.”

Her human let the sally bounce off of his frown, and digested the news. “… I suppose this is that sort of place,” he gave up. “So? What about the clothes?”

“The sleeves on his robe. They were weird. As if he was wearing several, and every one was a different colour. Yellow, green, and then red, outwards… Is that significant in any way? It felt deliberate.”

Paran thought it over. Then, his forehead became an even greater wasteland of wrinkles. “Those are _Toyosatomimi_ ’s colours.”

“Whose?”

“ _Toyosato—_ ” He waved the name away on a second consideration. “A Taoist saint. Hijiri’s competition, actually. Though between the two, that one’s requirements are rather more stringent. No _youkai_ , for one. Anyway, those colours you saw are flown as a rule by her acolytes. Maybe the order denotes rank. I wouldn’t know.”

“So that means…”

Her human sketched a mock sign against evil with his hand. “That means we saw a _Taoist priest_ leaving this dive – with a _youkai_ woman in tow.” He gasped with faked outrage. “That _has_ to be heresy.”

Yamame grinned. “What’s _Gensokyo_ coming to?”

Paran snorted. “What is it, indeed? At least, we shouldn’t need to worry after his making it through the night.” Then, less humorously, he added, “Maybe.”

He drowned his last guess in a hefty draught of ale.

Yamame, following his lead, washed down her own next thought.

 _A priest and a youkai,_ it was. _Scandalous._

And yet, blasphemous beyond all doubt though such a match was…

… Why, exactly, did it sound so familiar and threadbare?

* * *

They capped off their tankards inside the next minutes; and Yamame’s human, wheezing dramatically, hauled himself upright from the table. The richer of the two that he was, it fell to him, by ancient tradition, to refill their drinks. Thus was Paran uprooted from his seat. Thus he seized their empty tankards, and carried them again to the ale-giving spring at the bar. Thus was Yamame Kurodani left, if only for the trice, alone with her thoughts. In this enforced moment of solitude, she allowed those thoughts to ungenerously loop inwards.

With a tiny jolt of surprise, she realised she was enjoying herself immensely.

There was something to say for that. Yamame liked drinking, and no lie; her days spent among the Oni in the Capital (at least, those she had not worked) which had _lacked_ for a bottle of this or that drink could be modestly counted on a few hands. The red-skinned Oni partied as a matter of fact, not celebration; and to say their boiling blood was half _sake_ (and other half fisticuffs) would be but a quarter lie. Yamame had given those years, then – which she had later realised had been formative in her civilised life – to these parties, much as she had to her flowering craft. The eldest of the earth spiders had so soaked up of the Oni and their ways, it was a wonder her head hadn’t sprouted horns, and her fangs were still sheathed elegantly under her lips.

But there were no Oni here. The taproom was noisy on the whole, yes – but it wasn’t _tempestuous_. There were no brawls being brawled atop the tables or below; there were no cups shattered ritualistically underfoot. Nobody was crowing their war-deeds at clamorous volume; whoever of the patrons who did boast did so in contained circles. The drinks had been made to _taste_ , not to fold one’s insides like a map; and Yamame, who would by now have been (rather literally) roaring drunk on principle, only found a thin film of happiness clouding up her thoughts.

To divine why would have been as easy as avoiding a cow pie.

And yet, while cow pies are customarily easy to go around, one does not always succeed in the end. Nor had Yamame at all finished divining when, with a dull _clunk_ , the second round of drinks was placed before her on the table. Her human clambered over the bench and sat down heavily.

“Thank yooou,” Yamame crooned, reaching out for her share.

And then, she went rigid up to the roots of her hair when her hand was pinned to the buffed table-top. Her deepest-sewn instincts pounded up to the surface of her skin. Her fingers, raking, curled up into vicious claws.

… Until, feeling rather sheepish, they flattened out again when Yamame’s human kissed her full on the lips, and she yielded all over.

“… I’ve waited for this,” he breathed, once they had separated.

Yamame Kurodani, mother of plagues, the yearly malady, cast around the room in a nervous search for spying eyes bent on stripping her of her oldest titles. None were prying openly. Yamame, hugging her rescued authority close to her chest, turned then on her human.

“Waiting for what?” she complained. “To embarrass me? Again? It hasn’t even been that long, you know.”

Paran indulged her sulking with a smile. “No,” he told her. “I’ve been waiting to kiss you. That’s all.”

“In that case,” she replied hotly, “In that case, we could have done that any time! Why here? What is it with you and your conveniently inexpressible urge to touch me in front of strangers?”

“Would in front of Hijiri have been better?” Paran asked. “Or in front of your sisters? Or perhaps while you were working? This was the first good chance.”

“And when we were alone in our room?” Yamame wanted to know. “Wasn’t that a good moment?”

“… Not very good.”

“Why?”

“… Because,” sighed Paran, “Because then, it wouldn’t end there. I really… _really_ had been waiting.”

Yamame Kurodani, the eldest among the earth spiders, instantly sewed for herself a beautiful cloak of injured pride and heated accusations. In the very next instant, she had aged enough again to find it didn’t look as attractive anymore.

 _Who cares, anyway?_ she asked herself inside. _Who cares? Ashi knows you do these things already – she has_ told you _to do them – and she isn’t even visible from where you’ve seated your silly butt._ And were these humans all around so important? Was Yamame Kurodani, she who had lived among the Oni and still had secrets, going to build an angry fortress to defend against a single indiscretion?

She had but to think how much she wanted him to _kiss her again_ , to understand that, no – she wasn’t.

“… So, you invited me out here,” she theorised aloud. “To occupy ourselves with something else. In a place where you can afford not to look at me. To keep your dear propriety unstained.”

Paran looked ashamed. “… More or less.”

Yamame had to laugh. “You’re impossible! As good you don’t meddle with my projects; if I told you to design a bridge, it’d end up looping around three times before it came to the other end.”

“… Sorry.”

“But you still want to kiss me… right?”

Her human looked even guiltier. “… Yes.”

“You’re _impossible_.” Yamame shook her head. “My dear sisters are more honest than you, and I wouldn’t trust them to throw a die without two sixes. If I had been an Oni, I’d knock you. I mean, look at you. You lead me out here. You have me drink. You make me feel really good; you say this is a good chance; you say that you want to kiss me. And then? You stare at me – like I’m too stupid to understand what you just said.”

“You’re not stupid, Yamame.”

“Then why are you not kissing me?” she demanded.

Altogether, it had not been very subtle.

Altogether, Yamame Kurodani would never attest to spinning webs from thread this thick. Altogether, if anyone asked, Yamame Kurodani had it on very good expertise this web had been spun by someone else: a younger, less accomplished spider; as well, it could have been spun by a human – just blundering into the craft, too thick of fingers, and too clumsy to manage a finer material.

But it worked. It worked, and that mattered for everything in Yamame’s mind; and something passed behind her human’s dumb eyes, even as they realised the trap he had sprung.

Might be, those were his human’s instincts thrashing about. Might be, it was Paran thrashing them, for they always reined him in short. Might be, it weren’t his instincts but himself he was thrashing – if for nothing else then for bringing Yamame’s hair, neck and legs (and the rest of her) out here, to this public place – over the dim privacy of the room they had been given for the night, where awful, propriety-staining things could have happened to those legs without an audience on-looking and on-drinking. Might be, Yamame had seen none of those things passing behind his eyes, and had imagined them entirely. The one absolute remained – that it had worked, and her human was wedging the fingers on her trapped hand apart, until his own were once more mixed among them.

And then, that he was kissing her again.

Across the following moments, Yamame’s world heaved, wrinkled, and shrank, not unlike a loop of yarn pulled tight on a crochet. It narrowed at first to but the few surrounding tables. Then, it withered down to just their own. Soon, and it was only their bench which counted; finally – and _everything_ was elsewhere and far away. All that remained was Yamame, her silly face, her human’s silly face, and her human – silly enough to trust a _youkai_ , an earth spider, this near, and communicating this trust so.

He paused the kiss, exhaling. His breath was hoppy, like their drinks had been. Then, he kissed her yet again: first on just the corner of her lips, then fully in the middle. Maybe he had misaimed with his eyes closed. Yamame, her own eyes shut in total confidence, could not say. She began to trim away from coincidence when he went through the same entire manoeuvre a second time.

“… This is your fault,” he whispered during another such pause.

Yamame had barely managed to clamp her mouth after asking, “What is?” when he was kissing it again.

“This,” Paran murmured meaninglessly. “All of this is. It’s all your fault.”

 _Am I so evil?_ Yamame wondered inside. But if evil had rewards like these, then, for the moment, she did not wish to be anything else.

But then the moment, too, was over. With a titanic effort, her human dragged himself free. He dragged and dragged, until, at long last, his eyes were a whole one hand-span away from hers. Yamame’s ears hammered; and she was dazed by how hard the returned din of the taproom throbbed inside of her head. She was choked, and – she discovered – not a little out of breath.

Somehow, by pure strength of a spider’s will, she persuaded her chest to allow in a change of air. Then, she released it in a hot, shuddering blast.

“… You really had been waiting, huh,” she admitted.

Ahead of her, Paran’s face squelched tragically. Yamame laughed.

* * *


	24. Said it

It never mattered after that where they were anymore.

The eldest, most feared of Underworld’s spiders had climbed up, and pushed shamelessly out at her human, until he – who had very nearly sucked her lips off the front of her face – slid far enough out on the bench to let her slot in sideways onto his lap. Most pleased – about the lap, if not the lips – the spider had then taken up her drink again, and drank, all the while she had relayed the events of the past week to her envoy as it was dutifully required.

If Paran had assumed he would be prodded about his imputations of fault, then throughout the evening he must have had another colony of thinks coming. Though Yamame had been curious, and no lie; but to satisfy this curiosity meant dusting off an argument she and her human had been having for near on a month now. Yamame Kurodani did not dust arguments with others close by. The rising motes were certain to cause an uncomfortable cough. She had other ways of getting coughs anyway, had she but felt the need.

Asking that her human kiss her again each time he returned with new drinks, for one. He had been coughing before the third round had rolled in.

Another three rounds later, and their evening had rolled over to an abrupt end; and Paran, standing up to make good of his established function, quite casually attempted to kiss the floor rather than Yamame. The keg of apple-barley wine assigned for the night had run dry before too long; and the spinstress had called for stronger drink to take over the vacancy. The last round had rather plainly pushed her human away from tipsiness and over into tipping. So Yamame, giggling a little senselessly, wormed under one of his shoulders; so, as she bid the crafty barkeep an honest and heart-felt good-bye, she carried her limp partner outside.

In passing, she noted her younger sister and her entourage had at some point left as well.

Though, at first, Paran had made the task of walking him back to the town gate rather less than a walk in the park, as soon as Yamame had dumped him in a random backyard and let him be noisily sick over someone’s flowerbed for a while, her human had recovered the life-saving ability to shuffle along. The watch had since been retired from their post at the gate; and a list of names, faithfully recreated from drunken memory, had been nailed on the door beside a stick of charcoal on a string. Yamame stood her charge with his forehead against a nearby wall, while she deciphered the list for their names. Hers was misspelled. Paran’s, somehow, had been put down twice. Yamame crossed out all three.

Once they had left the decorative walls of the Human Village, however, the earth spider threw her caution to the wind. She drew from her preternatural strengths; and then, having sketched the familiar spell in her mind, she stepped up from the ground, and flew the rest of the way to _Myouren-ji_ – low enough as not to overstress the already rather delicate human. The featherlike touch of wind on her skin seemed to whisk away some of the grogginess; and Yamame Kurodani, in a moment of idle introspection, realised that – as numb a drunk as he made for – she enjoyed taking care of her human in this circumstance as well. More, there was a glowing sense of fulfilment that he relied on her – _trusted_ her – to keep him safe in this period of weakness, even though she was what she was… and even if it was not entirely his own idea.

She did keep him safe, though; and the _youkai_ arrived with her human in the relative safety of Hijiri’s domain precluding the unpleasantness usually involved in such encounters. The temple grounds were absolutely still, and Yamame almost tiptoed through the courtyard as she made for her guest-house. Paran did not tiptoe; albeit, in his state, a regular plod was much less like to effect noisy accidents. They stopped at the drinking well for a minute, and Yamame roped up a pail of cold water to rinse down the worst of the sweat and evil breath.

When they had at last locked themselves in their assigned bedroom, Paran was flagging, and Yamame – tired. The earth spiders’ envoy stumbled blearily across the room, and fell – almost straight from verticality – onto the unmade _futon_. He was asleep before he hit it. Yamame Kurodani gave a weak smile at the display of sleeping technique. Then, she walked across the room, to where her meagre belongings were stashed in little piles. She hesitated for a heartbeat; but then, she slid down the straps of, and skinned her overalls. She tossed them to the side, and grabbed the bottom edge of her undershirt. She pulled it off – inside out – over her head. She bent down, picked out a long nightshirt from one of the piles, and wriggled inside. Then, finally, she tugged the ribbon out of her golden hair, and shook it straight over her back.

Yamame Kurodani had not considered what to do about her and her human’s sleeping arrangements. Nor had she to, yet. When she turned around, her human was sat, bolt upright, on the messed-up _futon._

The thirty-second nap, it seemed, had granted him a sharper rise in awareness than the flight and cold well-water had combined. In the darkness of the room, it all but appeared as though he was – if not yet sober – then at least fully awake. His precious eyes were open, and staring.

Yamame Kurodani, at the end of her wits, spread out her arms helplessly.

“What?” she moaned.

Paran’s jaw unlatched, hanging open stupidly. It hung like that for a little while.

And then, quite calmly, he blurted the first stupid thing that came to his mind.

“… I love you.”

* * *


	25. Revelations, revolutions

Yamame Kurodani was an earth spider. This, among everything else, had never changed.

Since the first, dim flashes of an ossifying sentience, she had seen the world through the eight-eyed prism of a spider. It was she whom those fearful, twain-legged creatures called humans had, in a previous age, styled the mother of plagues. It was she who – egged on by her fledgling mind – had brought to those humans the only gift she understood. It was she again who had run before the swaying fires, screams and strange, incisive tools of metal. She, and no one else, had then wandered to the next village, and the next, and the one after that, fruitlessly seeking one which would accept the sole boon she had to bestow. None did; and the fire and tools had hounded her again.

At the end of her journey, it was she who had turned her eyes from the Sun-kissed world of humans. A smattering of spiders, whom she had met along the way, similarly disenfranchised, had followed her steps as she had left behind the surface world, and descended into the snaking burrows deep in the womb of earth. The mother of plagues had festered in the juices of her anger so for a time; until, some years later, others had come – the Oni – and sealed the road behind them forever.

Yamame Kurodani had changed afterwards. She had learned much, and matured some. She had taken what knowledge had been offered by the red-skinned people, and paid it back with cunning humour and repartee. She had given to them the use of skills her spat with humans had left engraved in her mind, and received presents in turn. She had lived (and died slightly each morning after a party) among the Oni thus, and thought those days happiness.

Then, the meddling gods of _Gensokyo_ had cracked the seal on the Underworld. And the world above had caught up to Yamame Kurodani.

No longer was she the walking terror she had once been. No more did the humans cry to the heavens at the sight of she who might fell scores of them with a single gesture or word. The world had aged, as had she; and Yamame’s diseases were grounds for panic no longer. She had been _reduced_ – from _the mother of plagues_ to but _a yearly malady._ There had been a grim satisfaction in terrorising the species which had spurned her; now, Yamame Kurodani was nothing more but an inconvenience – a nuisance to be avoided, only touched occasionally to bolster this or that god’s or doctor’s repute. She was hated, but not feared; and even if respect was given by some of _Gensokyo_ ’s humans who happened nearby her home, still Yamame was sure she hated them in return.

And now, one of them professed the opposite.

Yamame Kurodani knew _of_ love. She possessed a firm enough grasp of human relations to understand how they paired. She had listened, after all, for hours on end to the nostalgic reminisce of the exiled Oni; and love had featured oft in those stories: either as a device, or at times the matter of focus. Nor was it unheard of for love to flower between one of their kin and the rare human bold enough (or with tough enough a stomach) to make a lasting impression. But the boisterous Oni had ever been close to humanity; and Yamame, though she drank and laughed and fought to match, was never one of them.

She was only an earth spider. A _pest._ A _yearly malady._ This, among everything else, _had never changed._

Yamame Kurodani, her head swimming, gripped onto her nightshirt for support.

The human Paran, seated still atop his _futon_ , might be staring – but he was _not seeing._ She had to make him. She had to tell him, even if her sillier parts were screaming at her to shut up. She had to make him remember.

“But I’m a _youkai_ ,” she said. “An earth spider.”

Paran’s reply was instant and unthinking. “I don’t care.”

“I’m not human.”

“I don’t care.”

Yamame bit on her lips. “I control diseases,” she pressed on. “I’ve caused people to die.”

Her favourite human shook his head, slowly – in a way which reminded her less of him, and more of her maddeningly self-centred sisters.

“I know,” he said.

“I almost killed you on accident.”

“I know.”

“Then why?” the earth spider demanded hopelessly. “Why me?”

Paran angled his whole body a little to one side. “You’re…” He squinted in an effort to determine what she was. “… You’re wonderful,” he decided.

“I don’t understand!” Yamame protested.

“Ah—” Paran tried – and failed – to snap his fingers. “That is part of your charm, too. You don’t understand how… how _passionate_ you are. So, you don’t flaunt it. That’s what makes you wonderful. That, and,” he went on, before she could snip his thread of thought, “and you’re so _secure._ You know what you are – where you stand – but you’re unafraid to rise above it. You’re friendly, neighbourly, honest and hard-working. And you’re so, so very pretty.” He smiled. “You’re the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen. You’re so pretty it makes my chest hurt just to look at you.”

“I’m not a girl!” Yamame yelped. “I’m a _youkai._ A stupid, gods-forsaken earth spider. I’m not pretty!”

Paran’s smile melted from his face. “You aren’t stupid, Yamame,” he chided. Then, as if another idea occurring, his brows squeezed together, and he glanced uncertainly to the side. “No? Hold on… Maybe you are stupid,” he gave up. “I mostly hadn’t thought about it before. No matter.”

“ _Yes_ matter!” Yamame was shaking. “You can’t go and tell me something like that all of a sudden. I don’t even know what you want me to do!”

“Yamame Kurodani, you stupid spider,” Paran said with unflappable patience. Now, he sounded a little like her pipe-sucking Oni mentor, Nikuyama. “It should never have made matter what I wanted you to do. All that should matter is what you want to do. All I ever wanted myself was for you to do what you want to do.” He stopped talking for a few troubled seconds. “… That doesn’t make any sense,” he realised; “I just said—”

“I heard what you said. It made no sense.”

Paran shrugged. “Sorry. I must be drunk still.”

“You must be.” Yamame clutched the thought. “You’re worrying me. Why don’t you go back to sleep?”

“I just wanted to say I love you.”

“Stop that!”

“In a moment,” Paran assured her. “I’ll probably stop for a good while, too. I mean, stop _saying_ it, not… _God,_ this is so dumb. I’m so bad with words.” His eyes cringed shut. He rubbed the uneasiness out with his thumbs. Then, he looked again at the shaking Yamame. “My point is,” he told her, matter-of-factly, “I don’t care, Yamame. I’m too tired and too drunk to care. So I don’t care.”

Yamame began to feel her hairs coming loose. “What,” she whined, “What – exactly – is it that you don’t care about?”

“I was… _probably…_ getting to that. I don’t care what they say about you, Yamame,” he explained. “I don’t care what they say about you in our town. I don’t care what they say about you out of it, in the Underworld or wherever else. I don’t care what I say about it when I wake up in the morning. I don’t even especially care what you do about it. I love you. I want you to know that. I want you to think about it when I kiss you. I want to kiss you. I want to push you down and kiss you all over. I want to—” He choked back whatever else it was he wanted. “It doesn’t matter. It never should have mattered. I don’t care if it matters. I don’t care if you’re a _youkai._ I don’t care what they call you; I don’t care what you did in the past; I don’t care what my mother says. I don’t care what you did to my idiot father. I don’t care. I don’t…”

And then, his stupid voice petered out and died.

Yamame stopped shaking.

She began to tremble instead.

When she spoke, her own voice was tiny, and felt like someone else’s.

“What…” it asked quietly, “What did I do to your father?…”

“… Ah,” said Paran.

And it was everything he said. It was everything he needed to say. It was everything he had ever needed to say, and he said it now.

The pieces dovetailed together in Yamame’s spider’s mind – so exquisitely, she wanted to puke.

The blundered confession. The reluctance to impart his own history. The past tense in which he had spoken of one of his parents. The insistence that Yamame Kurodani had done no wrong, when the _Gensokyan_ doctor had put her under the hand of blame for the more recent attack. The intriguing to keep her out of the sight of their clients. The stiff, dead smile plastered to the lower half of his face even now. All so she wouldn’t find out. All so she wouldn’t learn that Yamame Kurodani _had_ done an _irreparable_ wrong…

… And, that she had done it to the one human – the _one in the entire world_ – who she wished could forgive her and accept her and trust her and embrace her and _love her_ and…

She could not bear it. It barely registered not _everything_ was clear yet; it was enough what she understood. It was _too much._

Before the first tears could drop, she tore across the room, ripped the door wide open, and fled into the night.

* * *

She felt, of course, acutely stupid about it the next day. The night had been a little cold, and sidling up to frogs in the rice fields to spook and watch them flop could only beguile her wounded emotions for so long. In the end, Yamame Kurodani wiped her cheeks dry, and returned to _Myouren-ji_ ’s sleeping guest-house.

Though still she rose as early as the first lighting outside. The last, seventh day of their project dawned; and Yamame’s responsibilities beckoned, wholly unenlightened of her internal conflicts. Who else, after all, could kick her sisters awake with no lethal reprise? Who else but their eldest may tell those deadly earth spiders to pack up their effects and shoo them home, to wait their rewards patiently like the good girls they were? None suggested themselves – less perhaps a certain human, who had broken in one spider, and at least allied with another.

But the human was still soundly asleep, snoring beside a pail of water which Yamame had drawn and left by his beddings before attending to her duties.

After they had left, Yamame examined her sisters’ influence on the guest-house. The damage wasn’t very bad; and it was with an almost pleasant distraction that she set to replacing the paper in the _shoji_ walls where it had been punched through. She took out and trashed a chewed-up pillow from one of the rooms; one door had been jimmied out of its frame and stood beside, so she fitted it in again. A plank in the veranda must have offended one of Yamame’s sisters mightily; for it had been stomped in about the middle, and stuck out over the surrounding ones not unlike shivers of a broken bone. Yamame pried the splintered halves loose and cut a new one from the leftovers.

As she was buffing at the new plank with a scrap of sandpaper to at least make it appear close to the rest, a nearby wall slid open to issue out into the morning Sun a tall (but slumped) man, whose eyes were hidden under a black sash wound around his head. Someway, he managed to visibly squint at the pale light, groaned, and tied a second blindfold over the first one.

He who called himself Paranseberi, the earth spiders’ envoy, the sole priest of his god, and one who counted his family among Yamame Kurodani’s victims, looked upon the labouring architect. Or, at least his head turned her way – blindfold and all.

“… Good morning,” he said to her.

Yamame kept her emotions as veiled as he kept his eyes. “… Hello,” she replied. “How’s the noggin?”

Paran’s noggin cocked inquiringly. “State or contents?”

Yamame Kurodani giggled despite herself. Without feeling much more shame, she admitted inside – for the first time since meeting her human – that she loved these bland little japes he made. “State!” she moaned. “State, silly! The contents can’t be done much about – unless you desperately want to introduce yourself to the eldest Komeiji. Although, I hear she is pretty as well – in her own special right. So it’s your call.”

Paran ignored the jab. “… State, then,” he said. “A bit delicate. I’ll walk it off. It’s been a while since I last vomited after drinking. I’m far out of shape. Or you’re too far _in shape._ Has Hijiri come by yet?”

“No. Why?”

“She has an invoice for me. Our payment. We discussed it yesterday.”

“Oh.”

A fraying thread of silence sewed into the air between them. Yamame continued to buff away. At distance, black-robed supplicants in a line began to file out of the temple after morning observations.

“… Yamame?” Paran spoke up at length.

“What is it?” she asked levelly.

“… You slept with me, didn’t you?”

The great architect of the Underworld clawed an ugly mark into the plank she had been polishing. She did not look up. She could not look up. She was looking up. She looked down.

“It was the room I was assigned,” she murmured. “I didn’t want my sisters to see me in… I didn’t want my sisters to wake up and start – start breaking things – even more things.” She punctuated the explanation with long, hard wipes of the sandpaper. “It was my bed by technicality – you know? You just were in it. I didn’t disturb you, did I?”

Paran began to jerk his head vigorously left and right. Then, abruptly, he stopped beginning to jerk it, and pressed his fists to his temples in pain. “ _Ouch, ouch, ouch._ That’s… That’s not it, Yamame,” he groaned. “I woke up when you were leaving – but that’s not it. I wasn’t… disturbed.” With a sigh, he slung his arms along his sides. “… Just so this is out,” he said, “I remember everything I said last night. Somehow. Gods watching, maybe.”

“What’s your point?”

“My point,” Paran said pointedly, “is if there is anything you want to fight about, then we should have it out before Hijiri bounces by. We’ll both be too busy after that.”

Yamame Kurodani threw the useless sandpaper and leapt up to a spider-agile stand.

A thousand things broiled in her head that she wanted to fight about – if not with her human, then with Hijiri, or with any of her _youkai_ devouts too confident to run. A thousand more pushed venomously onto her tongue as she bore down on the man who had made the eldest of earth spiders to bawl her eyes out like a prissy maiden from an Oni’s tale, and then had the gall to make an issue of having to share the bed. The bed which, in the first place, wasn’t even his. Almost two thousand things therefore broke from their strings and clattered down her puffed-up chest, each knocking her silly heart on the way. And it turned out, by the time she snapped at the collar of his robe and yanked his sash-wrapped head down to her height, that only three… only _two_ remained dangling aloft. Only three—

Only two, _two_ things, which Yamame Kurodani might want with her human in this moment of the morning.

 ~~( ) She wanted to kiss him.~~  
( ) She wanted him to apologise.  
 ~~( ) She wanted to kiss him.~~  
 ~~( ) She wanted to kiss him.~~  
( ) She wanted to apologise to him.  
 ~~( ) She wanted to kiss him.~~

* * *

(X) She wanted to apologise to him.

She did not want to kiss him.

Though he _was_ within a perfect kissing’s range, and that much was indisputable. To take it would have been simplicity. Move yet an inch, rise a little on her tiptoes, pull him slightly lower yet if she had to; Yamame could be kissing him inside the heartbeat, and there was nothing between them that would stop her. What could he do? Punch her? Strike the _youkai_ who had wronged him horribly and still had him playing to her whims since months? It would be idiocy.

The core of the problem was, she really, really did want to kiss him. She wanted to move that inch, stand on those tiptoes, and all the rest. She wanted to force out of him this one, final indignity – to wrap it up, store it as a prized memory – to bridge her over the coming seasons. And yet, she couldn’t. Not because her human would hate her – this was already on the far side of the equation; nor because of any physical impossibility – which she had just now dismissed. It was something more prosaic by half.

She could not kiss him because she _did not deserve it._

Yamame Kurodani, shrinking, released the front of her human’s robe and stepped away.

All her preparations, all the phrases rehearsed in a rankling corner of her mind – all aired out together with that simple realisation; and Yamame stood, pink-faced and trembling, without the faintest idea of what to do. She wanted to apologise. She _must_ apologise, more accurately; but, the trouble part was, she did not know at all where she should begin.

So, she selfishly skipped right to the bitter end.

“… I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so, so sorry.”

Paran’s blindfolded eyes judged her with an unseeable expression. “… What for?”

“For this!” Yamame flapped her arms, as though the answer was somewhere within the surroundings. “I’m sorry I got you so drunk. I’m sorry I made you come out here. I’m sorry I took this job even when you told me not to.” The sense of impending loss, which she had fooled herself she’d cried all out last night, flooded back twice as strong; and Yamame, burying her face in her hands, babbled on pathetically. “I’m sorry I sent you out again and again to find new entertainments for me. I’m sorry I started experimenting with touching. I’m sorry I had you carry all those heavy things down to my home. I’m sorry I had you keep it clean. I’m sorry I had you cook for me. I’m sorry I bit you. I’m sorry that… that I did… what I did, to your father. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

“Yamame,” Paran began. “That’s not—”

“No!” the earth spider yelled. “That - _is_ \- it! I haven’t done ‘no wrong!’ I bit you! I took away one of your parents! I may be a _youkai,_ but I know the value of family. I’ve had my sisters to teach me about this. I’ve had Niku. I’ve had…” _I’ve had you,_ she thought, but the words would not come out. “I—I could never take it if— I couldn’t bear it if I lost them! I understand that much. We have been together for _so long!_ It’s the same for humans, isn’t it? And I,” she sniffed, “I took away one of yours. You must hate me.”

Paran’s reply was a cold hammer to her chest. “Yes,” he hissed. “I did. I did hate you.”

It was a reply Yamame had both anticipated and prepared for. It was a reply which nonetheless blurred her sight and turned her knees to jelly. It was a reply which made her throat clench up so hard and her jaw get stuck so fast, they could as well have been iced over. It was a reply that could have shattered her silly heart, had the yearly malady not been so used to hate.

It was not even a half of the reply Paran had for her.

“I did hate you, Yamame Kurodani,” he went on, his tone bland and void of sympathy. “I hated you more than I had ever hated anything. I hated you so much I _prayed_ you would die. My father… expired after ten days of choking and coughing up chunk after black chunk of his insides. I wanted twenty days for you. I wanted forty. A hundred. The best if you suffered as long as you could. That is how much I hated you.”

“I’m sorry—”

“Shut up.” Paran’s words whipped her across the ears. “You stupid creature. You devastated my mother. The steadiest woman I had ever known, who had managed my father’s industry while he… caroused about, and did you know what she did? Nothing. She gaped on an empty wall for hours and hours, every day, until she was starving. I was a teenager then; I was fortunate to have the servants who knew the ins and outs of our family’s business. I grew up, hating you more and more with each year; but I was too busy – first with holding things together, then running errands for my mother once she recovered – to do anything about it. I’m past twenty five years now; I’ve another twenty five or abouts to live. I spent a quarter of that time hating you impotently from the bottom of my soul. And you tell me _you’re sorry?_ ”

“I’m—”

“And then!” her human rode over her apologies. There was an accelerating quality to his voice now – like a mountain brook racing toward a waterfall. “And then, imagine you this, that a servant is one day speaking to a client as I happen beyond the door, and they make a mention of my late father. A fool he had been, if you believed them. A ‘drunkard’ – which he perhaps was, overfond of drink – but, most of all, they called his fate _deserved._ That it had been pride – unmarried to wits – not accident, that had impelled him to venture close to your tunnels. Our family, you see, had _youkai_ exterminators a few steps back in the line, and my father had ever made a sharp point of this heritage. He claimed his blood was iron, not rayon, wrought from firmer things than those he vended day-to-day. I told you, once: that he had been a man with a lot to prove. And so he did.” Paran paused for breath. “And so he did prove it. That he had chosen you for this proving had made smaller sense. The servant said it had been random. That even the hawkish Hieda-lady, who makes a hobby of demonising you _youkai_ , consents you, among all the rest, are _at least_ reasonable. Maybe that was it, then: an easy, compliant target to display the _youkai_ -hunters’ blood ran still in our veins. It ran out of my father soon enough.”

Yamame was staring now. There was a misaligned cast to her human’s smile as it quirked up the edges of his mouth. It almost seemed a smirk.

“My life that day, Yamame,” he told her, “was skinned and turned inside out. But no. My father isn’t why. Maybe I still hate you, somewhere in a place where I don’t like to look. Maybe you still make me feel disgusted with myself. But it isn’t because my father was a foolhardy idiot. That reason was torn away from me that day. Ahh—” he sighed, and the sigh was made of pure relief, “That felt good, though! My head aches even worse now, but it felt good. I worked away half the night at this.”

And again, he smiled the same spoilt little smile.

“Well, but I’m shutting up. Your turn now, Yamame. I’m all yours.”

* * *

She stared at him, wide-eyed and cold, as if he had struck her after all. Then, she drew herself up.

Yamame Kurodani was an earth spider. A _youkai_. She was one whom long ago fleeing humans had decried the mother of plagues. She was one whose eight eyes, and so many segmented legs, inhabited their blackest nightmares. She was the Underworld’s great architect; she was…

… She was many things. She was many things, and more; and she pulled those things around herself – titles, curses and all – and spun them into an insulating coat. She picked away the ice which had bound her throat, and fashioned out of it plates of gleaming armour. She clamped her venomous teeth. She breathed in… and swallowed down the bitter implications of what she was about to say.

They stuck between her lungs: a hard, cancerous lump. But she said it anyway.

“… All right,” she said. “Very good, Paran. I’m _not_ sorry about your father. Happy?”

“Hardly,” he snorted.

Yamame flashed her fangs. “Quiet! It’s my turn. Take a look at me. I’m a _spider,_ ” she pointed out. “I _don’t_ attack unless it is in requital. It used to be otherwise, but not anymore. As you say, I am _at least_ reasonable. I’ve been accosted by you humans before; if I gave something nasty to your father, then that means he had done something to necessitate I did. I don’t recall what – I _couldn’t_ recall what – because this is _normal_ to me. I have _always_ been accosted by humans.” The spinstress dropped her tone. “But those other things? Those other things I said? I’m still sorry about those. You can’t take this away from me. I won’t let you.”

The human Paran – the good, stout, reliable human Paran – sagged at his wide shoulders, and raked his fingers down his face.

“… Your sister was right,” he grunted. “Those Oni _did_ ruin you.”

And then, he _cackled._

The cackle was low – low, grating and unpleasant; and it nudged a piece in Yamame’s mind which was at once remote and very important. A memory – for this was what the piece was – of that day, the one closer the opening of the month, when the two of them – the architect and her envoy – had turned over her previous assignment. When he, fully in his priest’s disguise, had been speaking with their client on the nature of those earth spiders who had delivered unto the humans their newest sanctuary. When Yamame, cloaked in the crown of a nearby tree, had been spying on.

The spider shape she had worn then had never known an emotion beyond the elemental. As such, it had never ascribed anything to their voices approaching the complexity of a tone or intention. There was only the way the sound rubbed against the feeling hairs on its legs: the intensity, its derivative range, the pitch, and the few signal associations which marked the source as either potential prey or a part of the environs.

The cackle now was the same as then. And Yamame, the two-legged version, recognised at once with nauseous clarity what it all meant.

It was derision. Mocking, undisguised derision: of her, Yamame, and her earth spider’s ways.

The lump in her chest dropped like a stone. Her voice, uncorked, unrestrained, came out in a toxic hiss.

“… I hate you.”

That got his attention snapping. “You _what_?”

“I hate you.” Yamame spat it this time – together with a globe of saliva. “I hate you. I see you now as you are, you Paransa-whatever your name is. A cheat. A liar. Toying with the spiders – with me – for some inexpressible end of your own. What did you hope to achieve, then? A name for yourself? He Who Outwits Spiders? Humans are all the same in the end, aren’t they?”

The human in front of her balled his hands into fists. “You—”

“But!” snapped Yamame, not without some vicious satisfaction of robbing him of a point, “But, I am nothing if not _at least_ reasonable. So, I won’t hold a grudge. I won’t give you anything nasty. I will not speak ill of you to my sisters or my friends. But you will uphold your end of our… contract. You will carry my rewards to my home, as you are obliged. Then, you can leave. I will not molest you, because I have rules and I have honour. You can even keep your share of the payment. But then, He Who Outwits Spiders, we are _finished._ ”

“Leave? LEAVE!”

And suddenly, He Who Outwits Spiders was inches away from her, and screaming. He was flailing his arms, his face contorted with rage; and it was only Yamame’s frigid offence which kept her frozen to the spot.

“LEAVE!” Paran’s voice jumped half up another key. “Finished?! You and I? You stupid, self-flagellating, egotistical girl! You think you’ve earned my compassion? My loyalty? How can you even begin to understand what I feel?! I gave up my friends, my remaining family, my home in my mother’s estate! All for you! I scattered my pride on my father’s grave, and scrambled to undo the horrid reputation of yours I’d unwittingly helped to grow! All for you! I journey again and again, to and fro, through forests and fields riddled with _youkai_ far less reserved than you, to carry requests and projects from those idiots I manage to persuade to trust you! And you think this has all been an entertainment to me? A pursuit of some empty glory? You think you can make me say those things I said to you – and then tell me to _leave_? So you can soak up in your delightfully prepared tub of self-pity? Never! We will never be finished, little spider. You made this about me, and I haven’t had enough! _Ouch._ ”

He groaned the final argument, bending half over and kneading his temples.

 _A mistake_ had been made.

This much, Yamame Kurodani, the yearly malady, realised instantly; even her less sophisticated form could have told by the volume and pitch of his voice that her human was infuriated. A mistake had been made… but ahead any further such brilliant recognitions might bubble to the fore of her mind, an entirely new and undesirable voice entered their private battlefield.

“Pardon me?”

They both wheeled around toward the edge of the veranda, beyond which the priestess Hijiri – resplendent in her black robes and the strange aura of one-ness with her surrounds – was standing. Again yet, it was Yamame’s human whose – oh, irony – human reflexes stitched out their circuit first.

The human bowed – deeply and with ceremony.

“Your ladyship,” he greeted the priestess. “Paranseberi bids good morrow to the Acharya of _Myouren-ji_.”

Nothing whatsoever remained in his tone of the explosive anger from not fifteen heartbeats before; and Yamame Kurodani found, as he dropped to the beaten ground, that there was an angle to her human’s personality – an entire mathematics perhaps – which she had never even speculated was there until now. His motions were slow, showy. His expression (what little of it visible under the blindfold) was trained; and his arms were joined inside overlapping sleeves in front of his stomach.

It made her chest clinch.

But the effects on the black priestess were expertly calculated; and Byakuren Hijiri did, too, bow – even as low to the tips of her boots. “ _Myouren-ji_ does graciously return the greetings,” she intoned. The master of _Myouren-ji_ unrolled back to her stately full height. The ritual completed, she extended to Yamame’s human a hand holding onto a scribbled sheet of white paper. “The invoice we spoke about yesterday,” she explained. “These merchants and wardens should dispense the items when requested. They are all good patrons,” she added with sincere pride. “My apologies, master Paran; I had not anticipated your arrival until, well, later today. These delays are inevitably an effect of that.”

Paran laughed good-naturedly. “None necessary, master Hijiri,” he replied. “My prematurity alone did you this inconvenience. So I shall countervail myself.”

“Or perhaps,” Byakuren suggested a touch slyly, “perhaps I should send a servant out even now, so you two may wait, and… meditate for the next hour or two? Work out your differences? Our temple is always open.”

“Thank you all the same,” Paran said quickly. “Alas. My religion prevents my longer involvement with your temple. A theological conflict, you understand.”

“Sad. But then, perhaps I have another proposal for you. Would you like for a branch shrine to be erected to your god on our temple grounds?”

“A branch shrine?”

“A god, any god, does needs require sustenance, else they shall surely perish,” Hijiri said wisely. “A branch shrine in our temple would draw many an eye seeking to give their worship. We do get a grand number of visitors, after all. It would do us great honour also to mark our amiable connection with the mighty Underworld.”

Had Yamame not been what she was and known her human well – far as she did, anyway – she might not have caught the minute cracking in his priestly veneer. “Your words are heartening,” he said next, and the crack was patched over, “but I – we – prefer singular obscurity. I must refuse.”

The priestess sighed her obvious disappointment. “So like a spider.”

“So like a spider,” Paran agreed.

Hijiri spread out her arms. “Then our business, master Paran, is also complete.”

Yamame’s human – her human – laughed again. “Good priestess, not close! This one—” here he motioned at the lip-chewing Yamame, “she will want to display the guest-house to you in detail yet.”

“I have seen the guest-house already,” Hijiri said, confused. “It is above satisfactory.”

“On the contrary. Our beloved Yamame is _extremely insecure_ about her skill in architecture. She will – with your leave – drag you roped around the building, counting on you to glare and scoff at every tiniest error made. Should you fail to do so, she will glare and scoff herself.”

“I… see.” The black priestess glanced at Yamame a little apprehensively. “My flock do cry for my return as soon as possible, but…”

Yamame found her voice. She roped it – and dragged it out. “… I will try to make good time,” she assured.

“There you have it,” Paran said. “It was a pleasure, master Hijiri, but I doubt it will be for you from now for the next five hours. Would you happen to know, perchance, where my cart is?”

Hijiri blinked away the momentary bewilderment. “It is… where you left it, I think. At the gate?”

“So it is,” Paran confirmed, looking out over the courtyard. “Then I bid the Acharya of _Myouren-ji_ a sorrowful good-bye. And you…”

The human turned his unseen – but not unseeing – eyes fully on the earth spider up above. His lips moved in visible articulation… but no sound was issued. At first.

“… I will meet you on the road,” he said then.

And having this instruction – or demand – delivered, the human Paran, sole priest of his spider god, turned around on a heel, and stamped off across the temple’s dew-speckled courtyard.

It was not until he was half-way to the gate – and well past the point of non-awkward return – that Yamame’s stupid head at last puzzled out what it was he had said to her without using his voice.

Her tiny heart soared, then sank, then soared again nonsensically.

He had called her a “pretty idiot.”

* * *


	26. On the road

To her wilting credit, Yamame Kurodani had made a decent time.

She had ferried the priestess Hijiri (un-roped) around the guest-house, explicating its quirks which escaped an uninitiated perusal. She had shown to the master of _Myouren-ji_ which rooms were best to be inhabited first, so as not to smoke up the interior with too many lampions and candles. She had invited the priestess inside the baths, so she may instruct their new owner on how to use – and if necessary, replace – its labyrinthine brass plumbing; she had even, feigning deep innocence, given a few pointers on how to tend the flowerbed, which Yamame’s sisters had planted along the guest-house in defiance of Hijiri’s notes.

The black priestess had frowned up a thunderstorm over the flowers. In the end, however, she had seemed to accept their budding existence – no doubt bending it in her head to this or that religious metaphor. At the tail end of the second hour, the earth spider and the Buddhist parted on peaceable terms; and Yamame, her tools and clothes bundled up, exchanged final good-byes with Byakuren Hijiri under the temple’s leaning _toori_.

“Should you have a change of mind,” Hijiri said by way of their fare-wells, “then know my proposal stands firm.”

Yamame’s sarcasm spoke. “Which one would that be?”

“The one about the shrine, of course. _Myouren-ji_ welcomes all downtrodden beings; it matters not whence they come, nor their domain. If you should prevail it upon your… partner, then we should welcome your god also.”

 _Not mine,_ thought the earth spider. _But you aren’t greatly bothered, are you?_ “I’ll prod him about it,” she lied.

“That is also well.”

Hijiri bowed then, with the same overblown ceremony she had given to Paran before. No flair for ritual dimmer than Yamame’s unless with her human; and so the spinstress offered up but the briefest of nods in return. Then, bolting the spell to the back of her mind, Yamame stepped outside the temple bounds officially, and launched in a powering arc over the roof of the forest.

As the wind of her flight pounded in her ears, Yamame Kurodani picked out the route she wanted from the Sun-blasted environs. Not in a die-straight line to the Goddesses’ Mount – onto whose slopes the warrens of the Underworld had spat out their secret openings – to the west – but _north-_ westerly first: over and around the Human Village, and up the rising terrain along a certain lonely road. The road – called the Pilgrim’s Way, if one believed those men so ideologically strong that they broke the town’s safety to brave it – took whosoever shall walk it to the Hakurei hill first of all, and the red-white shrine maiden’s home there. Then, bounding off yet farther west, it led the bravest (or most foolish, but also bravest in a way) of those travellers into the _youkai_ realm of _Moriya._

It was this road which Yamame, otherwise unfamiliar with the changed geography of _Gensokyo_ , chose to follow.

So it was with a sense of trepidation – and relief, but trepidation as well – that her spider’s eyes spotted a familiar figure trundling up the Sun-baked road with a push-cart laded precariously under a range of crates, boxes, bags and bundles. Yamame, grinning despite her every apprehension, thus broke her flight, and – making certain her landing was noticed – touched down some dozen paces’ distance ahead of the cart. It was sweltering down on the ground.

“Hello, stranger,” she called out.

The carter’s blindfolded face rose up lazily from its reverie. A thin smile sculpted briefly on its lower half. He stopped, and put down the cart.

“Oh no,” he said without much conviction. “A _youkai_.”

Yamame chuckled at the bland announcement. Arms looped behind her back, she skipped up to the cart, eyeing the containers with open curiosity. “Have you got everything, then?” she asked. “Hijiri didn’t swindle us out of anything?”

Paran shrugged. “We’ve got eggs.”

The spinstress giggled again. _I really should tell him to work on these jokes._ “Snake. And how’s your head? Still delicate?”

“It boiled out. I’m fine now.”

“That’s good to hear.” Yamame set her belongings down on the cart and pried the lid off the first crate that happened under her hands. Her human watched her without a word. “Vegetables, fruit… Isn’t this rather a lot? Are you sure it won’t go to waste? It isn’t that cold in the caves – especially at this time of the year. Won’t it rot before long?”

Paran nudged his chin at a sealed jar beside the crate. “Saltpetre,” he explained. “Yesterday evening gave me an idea. I’ve used what money was left and bought some off of one of the merchants. Should be simple work to cut yourself an ice-box and keep the produce fresh. Or drink cool, depending. Whatever is more important.”

Yamame looked at her human, her mouth slack, and her heart ripping right in two.

He was _so good._

Never mind he had, by rights, reasons to hate the eldest earth spider to bloody pieces. All the same, he had gone above the call of duty to better yet what Yamame Kurodani now considered as her day-to-day life. He had kept her house clean. He had cooked foods for her which would have been impossible to obtain before. He had gone out, twice and thrice and four times each month, to roam the town of his birth in search of those humans pliable enough to put their stock in the feared yearly malady. He had given her company. He had given her trust. He had given her affection beyond anything most _youkai_ such as she experienced in centuries.

He had given her _love._ And yet she: Yamame Kurodani, the mother of plagues, the great architect of the Underworld, the eldest, most powerful among the earth spiders such as she was…

… What had she, in her majesty, _ever given him_?

Yamame gripped the edges of the crate – so hard, her nails poked into the wood.

“… Paran?”

“What is it, Yamame?”

Yamame winced. “… You don’t have to leave,” she emptied the words among the fruit and vegetables. “You don’t have to leave if you don’t want to. If you want to, you can stay at my place as long as you need. You can use my kitchen. You can use my shower; you can keep using the room you’ve been using; you can even have my bed, if you prefer it over your _futon_. You can do whatever you like. You don’t have to leave.”

The human Paran – her Paran, whom she did not want to leave, but would let go at once if he did – blew out a wheezing sigh that seemed to go on forever. He stepped up onto the cart, ignoring the angry squeaking, and sat weightily down on one of the unopened crates.

“… It was never supposed to be about me, Yamame.”

Yamame, smiling miserably, stepped away and looked up at her favourite human.

The late Summer’s heat – as well as the carting – had made him peel off the outer layer of his robes. A thin, linen undershirt was all which remained, together with his airy _hakama_ on the bottom, and it left his sweat-sheened arms exposed to cool on the air. The muscles inside these arms were thick knots, and bunched from the exertion. His skin was red and radiated hot; and together with his wide shoulders, back, and legs used to carrying him across the land, the man calling himself Paran was not unlike an Oni – whittled down from its rocky geometry to a more aesthetically pleasing shape. His hair was damp and matted from sweat, but was soft and smelled nice when he came out of the shower.

 _And you like how he looks very much,_ someone jeered inside Yamame’s head. _Only you never named it so before._

“… Yes,” said Yamame, willing down an unaccountable blush, “Yes, you… You said as much, last night.”

“I may have tried to,” Paran conceded.

“I still don’t understand, you know? This is about me _and_ you. Why shouldn’t it be about you?”

Her human jerked his head left and right. “Because I was mistaken,” he rasped. “Because it makes me feel vile.”

“Because I’m a _youkai_?” Yamame wanted to know. “Because I did… well, what I did? Is that the root of it?”

“It’s because you’re _different._ ” Paran reached back and conjured a skin of water out of the assemblage. He levered out the stopper and poured it over his head. “… This should never have been,” he said, dripping; “I would have been satisfied being just your envoy.”

Yamame dared a smug little smile. “Would you really?”

“… No,” he surrendered. “Maybe not. But I almost had myself convinced elsewise, after you had bitten me. I almost had it. Then you began to experiment…”

“Then why does it make you feel so evil? It’s my fault, isn’t it?” _You said this as well,_ she thought, _albeit a touch earlier._ “Why should you bear the brunt of responsibility, when I gave you no choice in it from the start?”

“Because you’re _different,_ ” Paran repeated stubbornly. “Because it makes me feel like I’ve been forcing you to do things with me.”

“You can’t force me to do anything.”

“No,” he agreed. “But I can _make_ you, Yamame. And I have made you, on at least one count.”

Yamame fixed with him a hard stare. “You’ve never made me do anything I didn’t like.”

“Not even once?”

“Not even once.”

“… That isn’t the point.”

“Then what is?” Yamame exploded. “If this is because I am what I am—”

“It’s because those things _mean something_ to me!” Paran growled. “It’s because I’ve made you do them, even as I knew you did not know what they meant.”

“Then explain them to me!” whined the spinstress. “I’m not an animal! I understand things when they are explained to me. You explained to me why human females wore ridiculous dresses sometimes. I understood that. I wore several for you afterward. You explained to me what it meant when you embraced me in your point of view. I understood that. I’ve embraced you dozens of times since. You explained what it meant when you wanted to touch your lips to mine – to kiss me. I understood that. How many times have we kissed? You explained how I’d stepped on a sticky one when I’d consented to build for Hijiri and her cronies. Well, that—” she smiled sardonically, “—that, I didn’t understand. But I took away the point.”

“What if I lied?” he insisted. “What if I told you something meant one thing, but it meant another? What if I have done so already?”

“Would you do that to me?”

He didn’t answer.

“I don’t really believe you would, Paran,” Yamame forged on. “I think you’d sooner make a face, crawl back to your room, and sit there glaring at your belly, contemplating what it would look like carved out, than you told a lie. That’s what I’d do, anyway, if I had that propriety hanging over my web day and night. Or, if explaining things to me is so scary,” she tried a different angle, “then let me figure them out on my own, then _correct me_ after if I figure it wrong. We did that for kissing, didn’t we? Or did you perhaps give me a lecture beforehand – rather than telling me to _punch you_ , if you tried to force it on me by accident?”

Paran’s blindfold managed to look a bit guilty.

“This is what I want, Paran,” Yamame delivered her ultimatum. “I want you to do _what you want_ to do. If you want to leave, then leave. If you want to stay – stay. If you want to kiss me, then kiss me. If you want to tell me how you feel – tell me. If you want to lie to me, then lie away. I’m not poured from window glass. I’m not going to break. I’ll be a little embarrassed, perhaps – but I’ll weather it. I have already. Or haven’t I, Paran?”

Her human made a rusty sound. Then, leaning down with his elbows on his thighs, he accepted the challenge. “… Very good,” he gave in. “Then let us trial your method.”

“To the death?” Yamame teased.

“We’ll see. But this is what I want.” He threw the humour from his voice. “I don’t want to leave – I never have. But I am upset with you. Therefore, I want something from you. What is it, Yamame? Time begins… now.”

Yamame blinked up at her human – seated like a philosopher Oni atop a keg – in an exasperated protest. “... You’ve been needling me like this since yesterday,” she complained. “Are you one of my sisters now? What gives?”

“No hints,” Paran mocked. “Tick, tock.”

( ) She did something to him.  
( ) She said something to him.  
( ) She had him do something to her.

* * *

(X) She said something to him.

Yamame Kurodani knew well what she wanted to say. It was a simple spell. It was as simple as three words. More syllables separated a drunk from his next serving at the local tavern than Yamame wished to vocalise now. Her human had said it, and he had been tiddly, tired, and not a trivial degree careless. _I love you._ Three lousy words, and it would all be out in the open.

But _was it_ love? Yamame Kurodani had stitched together a handkerchief idea of the term from those stories told at the table by nostalgic Oni, or written down in various books. She knew what it stood for, and closer or farther what it symbolised. Nor was there any doubt in her mind that she wanted her human to remain at her side. There was little within, in fact, telling her otherwise than she wanted his company to be a regular thread in the fabric of her life. Though his jokes were bland, and his thoughts were hard to follow, and he kept his attention priced as high as precious jewels. Still Yamame Kurodani wanted to say the same about him that he had said about her. Those three words.

But there was a problem. A hole in the lining of it all. For whichever way Yamame spun the months of their acquaintance between her fingers, none of them turned out _a single_ tragedy. No one was being exiled. No duels were being fought in the name of love on beaten ground; no punitive sieges were being mounted, and no fires of disagreement were raising pillars of ruddy smoke into the sky. No bodies were cropping up in the dead of night. There was one death to count, yes – but it was years distant and uninvolved with what the earth spider now felt. There was nothing else. Only she, her human, a few mild misunderstandings, and a slowly tiding awareness that neither of them wanted to be apart from the other.

If it was love, then it was a very quiet one. Altogether unworthy of a story.

The question, Yamame realised then, had never been whether she loved him or otherwise. That slice licensed no lack of confidence. Might be, even, that she had loved him for a well good bit, but for her uncertainty had not allowed her to think she was… well, _allowed to,_ before. The sole question, then, was whether her internal definition could stretch enough to include what she was feeling.

There was even less of a story to tell when she found it stretched very easily.

And so it was that, with a heart clear of doubt and a-puff with a warm sense of satisfaction, Yamame Kurodani uttered the spell that had razed civilisations.

“I love you, too.”

The spinstress was rather proud of that custom finish. It reminded, at least – despite the applications of fault – that it was he by whom this potential war had been started.

The war did start, too: snake-like, with a sibilant replacement of air that Yamame’s confession must have punched out of her human’s chest. Then it was joined in earnest.

“… I don’t think you do, Yamame.”

The earth spider’s response was stridently direct.

Satisfaction wrapped up inside her heart so it could not escape, Yamame ripped short the distance between herself and her human, who would defy her spells. She stepped noiselessly up the edge of the cart, and tore the blindfold away from Paran’s head. Inside the same, smooth motion, she shoved out at him – not too strongly, but enough – so that he tumbled backwards off the crate, and down onto the sacks of rice and turnips and bales of fabrics that were Yamame’s reimburse.

Then, spider-quick, she leapt after him.

The cart made nary a groan of objection when she prised apart her human’s arms and pinned them down. What it did not, Paran made up for at volume.

“All right,” Yamame calmly rode over his exclamations. “Why?”

Her human, his eyes scrunched painfully shut, squirmed underneath her like a stuck fly. “Yamame,” he grated, “It _hurts—_ ”

Yamame hissed. “I’m not sorry.”

“Not _you_!” snarled Paran. “The light!”

Yamame Kurodani, the mother of plagues, let this human – who would play with her feelings so – to be punished by his own weakness for a few more pained grunts. Then, feeling not a little ashamed, she unlocked a half of her hold, and slid her freed hand across his eyes. Paran quit writhing.

“There. Is this better?” Yamame asked him gently. “I’m not hurting you, am I?”

The reply was resigned. “… No.”

“The bald truth is,” the spinstress went on, “I am sorry. I really am. Only, I thought I’d heard you denying my confession – and it hurt me quite a bit.”

“… Right.”

“We both know it is unwise to hurt a spider, don’t we? It makes them want to do unpleasant things. Me, I wanted to smack your mouth for a moment. Maybe brick it up afterwards.”

“That would have been inconvenient,” Paran opined.

“We are woefully short of bricks around, too,” Yamame added. “And, even if I were to dig up some clay and sculpt some on the spot, it would still take a decent while for them to bake. And it is oppressively hot out.” It was, as well; and Yamame had but to slightly curl her fingers to find the human’s skin was sticking wetly to hers. It was not an entirely unpleasant sensation now – but with time, it could feasibly become it. “So, Paran,” Yamame continued, “tell me this. Without risking us cooking to steaks out here… Why am I not allowed to say _to you_ , what you already said _to me_?”

Paran, to start, had no answer. Only there was a flicker of expression on his mouth, and his liberated hand seeking out hers. Once it found this landmark, the hand traced farther on. It grazed upward her arm; it reversed at her shoulder, and brushed the tips of its fingernails up Yamame’s exposed neck. In the end, it came up to her face and cupped one of her cheeks. It was offensively hot. Its palm was bumpy from calluses, and reeked sharply of the cart’s bare iron handles. It was big and clumsy. It was sticky. It was rough all over.

Yamame pushed against it, wishing silently it would touch her more often.

“… May be I picked my words wrong,” Paran’s answer finally issued. “I meant to say, it was too simple. Sorry. I’m bad with… saying things.”

“Sometimes,” granted Yamame. _Mostly when it is meant for me. I wonder._ “So, what was it that was so unacceptably simple? My confession?”

Her human nudged his head down and up. “Yes.”

“Was there some other way you wanted me to do it?”

He thought about it. “… Not _here,_ ” he concluded a little helplessly. “Not now. Not like this.”

“Yours was no better,” accused the spinstress. “I’m not saying I’m not glad you told me – but it left something to be desired.”

“That is why,” sighed her human. “You’re more creative than I, Yamame.”

“So, you wanted me to make up for it? Me?”

“You.”

“Who knows nothing about these things? The dumb me?”

Paran made a grimace. “You’re less dumb than I am.”

 _If we make this a contest,_ thought Yamame, _then shudder, Underworld._ “So,” she asked, “if you didn’t want me to tell you… well, that – then what _did you_ want me to do?”

Again now, her human secured no spoken reply. Again, it was his hand which did the answering first of all. Now, its thumb was disengaged from its sibling fingers. Then, it glided – slowly and longingly – across Yamame’s lips.

The spinstress could not hold back a soft laugh.

“And you curse me for being simple!” she moaned. “Sloppy, Paran. Sloppy!”

“… You underestimate how addictive this is for me, Yamame.”

“No,” she told him. “No worries. I understand completely.”

 _At least, I’m beginning to,_ she corrected inside, even as she bowed down and gave to her favourite human what he so desperately wanted.

Might be it was because now was a time of answers and returns; but the spinstress mirrored her human’s drunken kissing from the previous night – touching her lips firstly to the corner of his, then slipping toward the centre, and there pressing down in a tender expression of absolute trust. Trust, and – which was little deniable now – that other thing as well. The three-word thing.

Thinking about this, Yamame took away the kiss – for long enough to sense the human readying to speak inside her hold. Then, in a swing of pointless, petty, loving revenge, she kissed him again.

She did it three more times until she had her fill.

When finally she let him let it out, her human’s voice was noticeably diluted.

“… You know, of course,” he was almost whispering, “You know that I _have_ lied to you?”

Yamame indulged him with a smile he couldn’t see – but probably felt. “About what was it this time?”

“This.” He moved underneath her vaguely. “What you just did. It’s not a sign of affection – not just.”

“I imagine you would have stopped at my cheeks if it had been,” Yamame said. “Which you positively couldn’t – if I recall a certain evening a while ago.”

“You were _really_ pretty that evening, Yamame.”

That squeezed another tiny laugh out of her chest. “Tell me why I was ever convinced you were hard to please!”

“I frowned a lot?” Paran theorised. “Grumbled, as well.”

“Kept trying to hide?” supplied Yamame.

“Kept trying to hide,” he gave up. “I should have eaten less. Would fit in more cracks now.”

“But you still wanted to kiss me – really kiss me – as soon as you were close to it.”

“… These things keep turning out, don’t they?”

“And still, here we are,” Yamame dramatized. “You – unbitten, and me – thoroughly un-outraged. The Oni might pull you out of your hide for lying alone; I think your lies are small. My sisters lie bigger than you, and they are subtler about it as well. You? Yours need work. Because this—” She brushed her lips briefly against his. “This? This, even now, doesn’t outrage me. At all. I’m built of less flammable stuff. I need worse lies to bite.”

“… How much worse?”

“Mm, let me see,” she purred. “Say that you _doubly_ lied to me right then, and that _was_ but a tiny sign of affection – just. I’d be put out overall. Not saying I’d _bite,_ necessarily,” she teased, “but I’m not saying I wouldn’t. Any way you trim it off, you can never know with spiders – right?”

Paran deflated with mock relief. “I’ll vow by the one lie, in that case.”

Yamame chuckled. “That’s disgusting, you know? Maybe I should let slip the dread Oni on you after all. How would you like to hide from those?”

“Here’s something that isn’t a lie then,” offered her human. “I have a wad of very hostile turnips stabbing me in the small of my back.”

“Heinous. What about them?”

“Ah—” The human’s clipped exclamation was so familiar she was smiling before the reply produced. “See… A spider of some sort is aiding them enormously from above.”

The spinstress grinned. “Are you calling her fat, perhaps?”

“I’m calling her in cahoots. These are some ferocious turnips, Yamame.”

Yamame Kurodani, who was unconversant with the villainy perpetrated as a rule by farmland goods, rose up on her knees until the human was free to adjust, notwithstanding of the diplomatic implications. Hot air billowed out from under the skirt of her dress. The human Paran, escaping at last the turnips’ torture, arched his body up. Then, vengeance apparently on mind, he fell again on the sack – killing droves and droves of treacherous little vegetables in one pitiless stride.

Thusly having satisfied his blood-thirst, the human spoke again to their whilom ally.

“… Yamame?”

“Yes? I’m here.”

“You are,” he agreed. “Would you happen to have my blindfold?”

“I have it. Would you like it back?”

“Would so,” Paran wheezed. “Much as I’d love to lie around with you on top of me all day, we aren’t getting any closer to home.”

Yamame bit back the yearning question that had stitched together in her chest. Instead, she drew about it the entirety of her pride that had been scattered before the human’s dismissal of her feelings. The scattering had been, of course, unsubstantiated; and Yamame swore to maul whichever internal division of her had ordered it in the first place as soon as opportunity presented. The pride was a little dirtied, but it wrapped evenly around her throbbing heart.

“Not yet,” she said. “I haven’t heard how you are going to apologise to me yet.”

The rewards of acting – for once – with authority were instantaneous; and the human Paran must have remembered all about the turnips below. His jaw set.

“… I must, mustn’t I?”

“Must,” declared Yamame. “I’ll forgive you, naturally. But not before you make it up to me.”

“How?”

“How do you want to?”

“… That is a trick question.”

“It is. I’ve tricked it out. So? Chop-chop, Paran. We aren’t getting closer to home, are we?”

The human feigned a period of deep consideration. “… When we are home,” he said at length. “When this is settled in; when I have taken a shower and eaten… Would you like to try doing something else with me?”

“Another ritual?” Yamame guessed.

“… Of a sort.”

“And this is what you want?”

“… It is,” Paran surrendered. “It’s what I want.”

“Then,” said Yamame, “I’d absolutely love to try it.”

The human sighed as the manacles of promise locked around his wrists.

Yet, even when the not-so-fat earth spider did undo her hold and let him to rise, the human Paran did not seem at all a man who was shackled and being dragged to the gibbets. There was even – Yamame saw as he was tying the sash again round his maladjusted eyes – something like a smile quirking his mouth against his will. A small, diffident smile: almost like that of a boy who had secretly wished a wooden sword for his birth-day but never told anyone – yet got exactly that. It was an adorable little smile, which Yamame Kurodani wanted to coax until it was a wide, crescent Moon of happiness.

The thought, somehow, made her feel extremely fulfilled. Though she had done nothing for the smile yet; she knew – in time, and out of the heat – that she could. It made her feel warm. It made her feel sure. It made her feel needed and purposeful.

Most of all, for the first time since the day’s tragic revelations, it made her feel that she could – eventually – really deserve to be loved.

* * *


	27. Homecoming...?

The few hours in consequence dashed by in an escort of squeaking wheels. Always slightly uphill, rarely deviating, Yamame Kurodani walked beside her human in the furnace late-Summer heat, all the while as he carted her rewards to her home under the Goddeses’ Mount.

Though never more on both their lately mishaps, they filled these sweating hours with talk. They discussed, at excited length, how best to design the ice-box which was soon to outfit Yamame’s home; they fought, for a bit, about where it was then best to be located. Paran, ever practical in his insights, wanted the ice-box without the house – where the air was admittedly cooler; Yamame, who ever lived on the nearer side of her surrounds, wanted it closer at hand. At the most heated point of the argument, the spider and the human both convened on the idea the weather ill needed a wildfire to boot with the blasting Sun. They agreed to fight another day.

Afterward, a new amusement chanced across Yamame Kurodani. The human was persuading the cart past an especially rough stretch of the road when it did; and Yamame, all soul of politeness, suggested gently that she may, in pretty actuality, be possessed of two arms and legs (at the moment), and thus capable of helping.

Paran’s reply was jealous.

“This is my job,” to hear him grunt it at the rocky ground.

He spat it again and again, in fact, until – with pouting indignation – the spinstress slipped under his straining arms, grabbed at his big head, and kissed it until he was soft. Then, using of this weakened state, she shoved him away from the stubborn cart.

They switched again, of course, soon enough; but, no matter his nagging, Yamame continued to utilise this threat of tactically-deployed affection to keep the workload from irreversibly bending her favourite human’s back. Oddity of oddities, even a dozen such manoeuvres after, the human still seemed keen on pressing the issue to the end each time. Obviously, a deception of a sort of was in progress. Yamame scented it well enough.

She did not pursue it.

After the thirteenth repetition, she realised why else she didn’t. There was a glowing sense of achievement in being the initiator for these moments of intimacy. Though it was not the first and only instance she had; all the same when she searched her memory, Yamame Kurodani knew it had been her human, a majority of the time, who had played seamstress to those moments. There was nothing shameful about it; and when she coupled to it the theory that Paran hadn’t fallen in love with her yesterday, it made precious much sense that he would have been trying to express it in the one manner he could. In essence, he had been confessing to her every morning, and every evening, for weeks already.

Now she knew finally what he had meant, Yamame enjoyed returning his every little confession tremendously.

Thus did the human Paran arrive un-bent at the mouth of the tunnel at the bottom of which Yamame’s home was waiting. Thus the earth spider, gladdened immensely of this result, did kiss away his complaints, and helped him to prepare the cart for transporting down.

The cart, commissioned by Paran from one of his kinsmen months prior, was a drop of dexterity in the sea of clumsiness that was humankind. The tall, steel-hoop-shod wheels, which were fitted onto a high-set axle and sturdy enough to traverse _Moriya’s_ slanting roads, could be detached; the load, then, rested upon a set of long skids, which ran lengthwise underneath the cart, perpendicularly to the axle. This in turn made it perfect for sledding the goods – carefully – down the stairs, which led to Yamame’s domain, all in one trip.

It was only halfway to the bottom when Hijiri’s generosity became an unexpected twig in the net of usual procedure.

The cart – sled now – had attempted thrice already to ride over the human who had been supporting it from the front; now Yamame, with whom he had switched places, felt it attempting to do the same to an earth spider. Something, as well, must have spoiled in the Sun and spilled over inside one of the crates from the shaking – for an acrid smell was brining the stale air of the tunnel. This, as things were with earth spiders, was at once met with reprisal.

“All right, no!” yelped Yamame. “That’s enough! I’m going to hop on down and grab some rope!”

“What?” It was not the cart questioning her sentence in a startled voice, but her human. “What for?”

“We’ll run it under,” explained the fuming spinstress. “Under and over. Then, you’ll take it from the front, while I rein it from the back. I’ll not have a gods-forsaken cart ruining my afternoon! _Fuh!_ ”

Then, ahead Paran might point out any flaws in her plan which she would then need to smother, Yamame Kurodani skipped down the even basalt steps at an urgent bounce. The stench of rotted matter seemed to trail behind her.

It was not. And, when she reached the base of the stairs, Yamame Kurodani realised, horrified, that it was _she_ who had technically been following _it._

Her home was _devastated_.

From the tunnel’s opening, where she all but became part of the stone floor from shock, Yamame could see the ruined insides of her salon – visible through a monstrous hole smashed through the wider flank of the house. The cavity encompassed fully half the building with its bizarrely rounded edges. Confused, rancid chemistry was sloughing from those edges in fat, putty-like swells, climbing groggily down what still remained of the walls. A disgusting moment, and Yamame recognised that _these were the walls_ , and that the hole had not been punched – but _eaten through_ from within by some malignant substance. An ankle-deep pool of rank, necrotic sludge encircled the half-digested house. As Yamame watched on in still awe, a pane of glass loosed from a partly-dissolved window. It plunged with a sickening _plop_ into the stinking pool, exciting an eruption of decomposing gas. A film of sick, yellowish haze draped the whole catastrophic scene.

One of Yamame’s forearms tingled suddenly; and she cast downward on a reflex, to flick the irritant away.

The irritant was _her own body._

The naked patches of her skin were _bubbling_ – sizzling, dying, and discarding in purplish flakes – as her magickally-sustained biology rapidly reconfigured itself to combat the predatory poison that had subsumed her home. The hem of her dress close to ground was quickly becoming stiff and black and brittle.

 _If anyone else walked into this…_ Yamame managed to think.

Then, it clotted into something much more terrifying.

_If Paran walks into this…!_

A clamp of blind, all-enveloping fear closed down on her every sentient thought.

Without so much as glancing twice at her consumed home, Yamame Kurodani ripped back into the exiting tunnel. It felt hardly three heartbeats before she reached the most important thing in her life. It was less than a quarter of another, and not a scream, before she seized it in two fright-gripped arms, and launched for the safety of open air above.

The cart, bereft of its support, leaned forward precariously, and skidded with a great clatter down into the ravenous death below.

Yamame did not hear it.

* * *

The tunnel spat her out, tumbling, onto the green Summer grass.

As she broke the flight with her back, Yamame’s instincts flash-burned with activity. Her upper limbs opened up, spilling her baggage to the side; then, she rolled onto her belly, scrambling to find a gravitational level. The baggage issued a rattling noise, and the earth spider all but moulted then and there. She whipped around, hairs standing on the ends.

The baggage… The _human_ – her beloved human, Paran – was laid curled up, foetal, on the rocky ground. His hands were pressed painfully to the front of his head.

“Curses!” he was grating between his teeth – only the word wasn’t “Curses,” and what it was brought the less primaeval Yamame, deadening, back to the surface of her mind.

The spinstress flipped her human forcefully onto his back. There seemed nothing off the usual about him at first; less one counted his clothes – which he had again put on before they had descended – were damp from perspiration, the human Paran looked to be untouched by the foulness which had dominated their home. The areas of his skin showing were tan and healthy. No outward damage was conspicuous. He had his hands stuck tightly to his eyes – but Yamame knew this was for he had taken off his blindfold once inside the tunnel, nothing else.

None of it did anything for her crushing fear.

“Paran?” she gasped. “Are you all right? Can you breathe?”

“What?” His voice was alarmed. “I can. What—”

“Are you itching anywhere?”

“… No,” he said after a few seconds. “Yamame, what are you—”

“Stop. Can you feel your body? Are your senses working?”

“I can feel you kneading me. That counts?”

Yamame’s attention startled down to the human’s front – where her hands were clawing up and down in tugs of insensate panic. She willed them to quit. They didn’t.

Then, they did quit, when her human had freed up one of his, and overlaid it cautiously on her twitching fingers.

“Calm down,” he hushed. “I’m fine, Yamame. Calm down.”

“I am calm.”

“You’re pinching me,” Paran disagreed. “I can hear you going like a bellows, too.”

“Maybe I am not calm,” Yamame gave up.

“I’ll hug you, if you want,” he offered. “But not when you’re like this. Calm down.”

An anxious giggle shoved past the block in her chest. “Still so proper, after all that?”

“My ribs are only bone. They can crack.”

He was, of course, right, and not even about the material of his internal workings. Yamame should calm down. She was doing no one favours succumbing to hysteria. The insipid jokes had helped; and – slowly, by degrees – the spinstress did re-master her ragged breathing. Paran, sensing the change in the breeze, pushed up to a sit. He looped one arm in front of his vulnerable eyes, but kept the hand of the other stoutly atop Yamame’s. The double staccato of his heartbeat under his skin was somehow very soothing.

“What happened?”

Almost, and the question would have shot the choking lump back up into her throat.

Yamame swallowed it down. “… My home,” she murmured. “ _Our_ home. It was attacked.”

“Attacked?”

“Someone… Someone _ate_ it.”

“Ate? What sort of—?”

“There was a huge hole,” Yamame interrupted. “And poison. And everything was dissolving! The house was half gone – melted down. The rest still is. The whole chamber is as if someone had emptied their stomach into it. My dress began to break down after only a few moments. If you had gone down there—”

Paran squeezed her trembling fingers. “But I didn’t. Was the culprit there?” he wanted to know. “Did you catch them?”

Yamame blinked. “What? No. There wasn’t… There wasn’t anyone. It must have happened a while ago; these kinds of poisons – acids – are slow-working. It could have been as long ago as yesterday. It could have—”

And it was then she realised. The thought was a glowing red welt across her mental processes.

Had the human Paran not joined the great architect at _Myouren-ji_ the previous day… Had he not ventured out prematurely to meet with her in Hijiri’s domain; had he _not_ missed her enough to risk her displeasure at running ahead of their timetable… Then, he could have well been caught in the attack. He could have been in the house when it had been assaulted. He could have been naught now. Naught, but a puddle of spoilt residue – meat rendered down, bones naked and bleaching – lost in the glutinous ruin of her home.

He could have been _dead._

“Yamame, focus!” The human’s voice was sharp, commanding. It was alive. “Shaking isn’t telling me anything.”

The earth spider gathered up her will. The shakes, for the minute, shrank away. “… You’re awfully placid about this,” she accused her human. “What gives? It was your home, too.”

“Maybe because I didn’t build it,” Paran joked humourlessly. “Would flying to pieces have helped, Yamame? Trust me. I’m as furious as you are.”

“You aren’t.”

Her human shrugged. “No, I’m not,” he surrendered. “But I am scared. That is why I need you to focus. I’m at your mercy out here. What do we do?”

The weight of expectation – of responsibility – at last pressed the panic out of her head; and Yamame, thinking the clearest since her plan for the overburdened cart, analysed the next possible moves.

The eldest Komeiji would need to be let know. Never mind she had personally extended her protection over Yamame’s “endeavours;” since the earth spiders were technically exempt from the laws of _Gensokyo_ , it fell therefore into the hated mind-reader’s lap to resolve their complaints. If the attack had been aimed at Yamame, who was the architect of the Underworld, then Satori Komeiji by rights should take up investigation. This much was unambiguous.

But what about him? What of Paran? What about the luckless human stuck between the two worlds? If the attacker was at large still – and aimed to harm Yamame – then it was Paran – not her home, not her belongings – who was her greatest weakness. There was another layer of meaning beneath such a statement, but Yamame shelved it for later.

Something must be done about her human. An option implied itself out of custom that Yamame ought to turn to her brood – her sisters – first of all. But the excitable exteriors of younger earth spiders were no thriving neighbourhood for one of the frailer species. His own home environs likewise were out of the question. As he would be endangered in her habitat, so Yamame Kurodani should be in peril if her presence was discovered in the Human Village. Then, she could no more protect him. _Should he be protected?_ she asked the busying threads of her mind. _Would he not be safe among other humans?_ Yamame had but to remember her uncritical panic minutes before to decide differently. Slim though the chance may be; still, whoever should draw the ire of the “lawless” Underworld, they might also violate such edicts as bound the _youkai_ on the surface. Yamame did not wish to lure this chance.

There were other, more selfish reasons as well. They did not matter much. Not for now.

The web of possibility tore down, therefore, to a dual twine. There were but two places in the Underworld that a human might be – and indeed had been – safe inside. The first of these was the underground Capital – with its shining lighthouses and their empty rooms, whence a spider and her partner may cast their summons for a mind-reader’s help.

The second, and more forbidden… was the mind-reader’s den itself.

( ) The Capital, and its lighthouses.  
( ) The mind-reader’s forbidden den.


	28. Recourse

(X) The mind-reader’s forbidden den.

But qualms like these meant little and littler when disaster had fallen so close. The Komeiji may not make for the best of company – perhaps not even good – but their function they would dutifully serve. The youngest one had claimed as much; and as for Yamame’s human, she knew by way of rumour already one of his kin had stood Satori Komeiji’s care, and lived. Another one was a matter of recounting the training.

Yamame Kurodani sighed her hope that the vicereine of Old Hell would treat kinder this human than she had treated her previous. But perhaps, as well, a touch _less personally._

A tiny, embarrassed frown pushed her brows together. _What am I imagining?_ The jealousy was misplaced. It was ugly to boot; Yamame wrung it out together with another sigh.

“Any decisions?” Paran quizzed her exhalations. “Anything? Yamame?”

The spinstress starched her heart. “Yes. Two,” she told him resolutely. “Can you walk, first of all?”

“Somebody wouldn’t allow me to do my job properly,” reminded Paran. “I should be fine with some more walking. Why?”

“There is another opening an hour away thereabouts.” Yamame swung her free arm approximately westward. “There are few who use it, since it is fairly new and leads nowhere but the Hub, and there are some narrow bends to fly, but it is a more direct route.”

“Yamame. If you are pointing somewhere, I can’t see it.”

“Oh.” Yamame’s arm went limp. “Um. It’s to the… It’s on the western slope. Opposite of the _Tengu_ settlement.”

“That doesn’t mean anything either way,” said Paran. “What is that Hub?”

“A sort of cross-roads,” explained the spinstress. “Some call it the Heart Chamber. Some say it itself is Old Hell. It lies above the Capital – straight below the peak of the mountain. There are tunnels there branching off more or less to any place in the Underworld you can name. Satori Komeiji has her home there.”

“Your so-called Lady,” Paran remembered. “And we are going to impose on her?”

“Impose is what you did yesterday,” chided Yamame. “We are going to ask for her help. The eldest Komeiji is our counsel, even if we rarely call upon her in that capacity. My home is still in her realm; if nothing else, then she will house us while I get messages out to friends who will help us find what caused this. You will be safe.”

“Yamame.”

“What?”

“… I could still return to town.”

Yamame’s fingers – those still encased in her human’s – curled into tiny hooks. The human Paran, if he had noticed, did not say.

“I haven’t enough money to lodge in an inn or stay-house,” he went on, “but I could beg of my mother to let me stay in for a time. Until this blows over. Until you deem it’s safe again. My mother is hard – but she isn’t unreasonable.”

“I’ve thought about this.” Yamame, senselessly, shook her head. “I’ve thought about it. No.”

“Why?”

The spinstress breathed in. “… I don’t want you to leave.”

“… Why?”

“Because I love you.”

She launched the words very fast, as if the briefest thought could knock them out of her web.

In the end, it was selfishness, and nothing else, which had thrust them out. There were – to Yamame Kurodani’s tottering honour – other excuses, and no mistake. Had the mother of plagues, for instance, trodden with reason rather than greed – then there was no doubt in her mind the human would have outpaced her inevitably. Had she given Paran but the chance to, he would have snapped the links of her logic with never a care; for reason was the humans’ arid kingdom, and no place for a spider. But she had danced these dances, had Yamame Kurodani, and threaded out what it was which her human could absolutely never say “No” to.

A little trivially, it was this basic argument. These three (or were they four?) sorcerous words.

The effect on her human was almost obscenely efficient. He glared at her – for what good it did him to glare through the flesh and bone of his arm – his mouth set into an angry line.

“… All right,” he rumbled. “All right, Yamame. Very good.”

“Really?”

“I’ll abide by whatever you think best; but,” he warned, “I warn you, Yamame Kurodani, I hold no sympathy for _youkai_ who aren’t you. Keep this Satori Komeiji away from me, or I will visit with the Hakurei on my very next trip.”

“You tolerate my sisters,” Yamame argued. “You’ve tolerated Niku – eventually. You’ll be fine.”

“Only because of you,” he disagreed. “Only because they’re yours. You’re special, Yamame. No one else is.”

“What about Ashi?”

“I like her,” Paran said artlessly. “Mostly because she and I both adore you. This Satori-lady sounds a different story by half.”

“She doesn’t hate me.”

“But she doesn’t love you,” he insisted. “And I despise those who do not love you. Forget it, Yamame; you’ve decided,” he pre-empted whatever reply had been shaping on her lips. “That is plenty. You’ve polished up the sharpest blades. I’m not going to fight back.”

 _I’d love it if you did, even for a bit,_ thought Yamame. But for her human’s integrity she agreed, “Very good. Then let’s impose on the Komeiji.”

That earned her a tight smile. “… Are you sure we cannot go down?” Paran asked then. “There were some pricey things on that cart.”

“No,” Yamame said, firmly. “No, Paran. If it’s slipped all the way down, it is as good as gone. If it hasn’t, then we can recover it later. Once the poison has run its course. It’ll turn benign in a few days at most; even our venoms seldom last longer. Until then…”

“Until then,” Paran picked up, “no turnips.”

Yamame chuckled. “And no ice-boxes, either! All that squabbling, and look! Here we are. Maybe someone had been listening, and we’d been too loud?”

“Then I hope he isn’t listening even now.”

This dearest hope cast, the human Paran released Yamame’s little hand, and sought out the blindfold safe-kept in one of his pockets. This, once found, he gratefully wrapped around his head. Yamame Kurodani, kneeling beside him, then met with her human’s invisible stare.

With a pull of sudden and overweening misery, the spinstress realised she had not seen his eyes – or at least looked at them very long – ever since the distant previous evening. There had been other things to mind since then – and to look at – yes, there had been; but for Yamame, who loved her human’s eyes, these were now very sorely missing. All but, and she would have reached out, pushed up the protective cloth, only to have a single look.

These were a foolish spider’s urges. Yamame willed them out.

In time, as well; for the human had one question yet.

“… What is the second, then?”

Yamame looked at him, confused. “Huh? Second what?”

“Second decision,” Paran said. “You said you had two.”

“Oh! Um. Well… There are two ways to the Hub,” she explained. “There is a path down the opening I mentioned, that can be climbed down. It is a long going, but doable on foot. The other path is… less climbable, shall we say? Quicker, though – and easier. So…”

“… So, we might want to fly,” Paran guessed, forehead wrinkling like a freshly washed bed-sheet. “Splendid.”

“Will that be OK? I promise I’ll hold onto you very tight.”

“We flew just now, Yamame,” sighed Paran, “and I’m only bruised. It should be OK.”

“… Sorry,” said the spinstress. “I was scared. I hadn’t even thought what I was doing. I just wanted to get you out of there. As fast as I could.”

“ _Only bruised_ , Yamame,” repeated her human. “It should be OK. My mother used to say men were made to be bruised – and learn therefrom.”

 _What did you learn here, then?_ wondered Yamame, even as she watched her human rise to a wobbly stand. The stand _was_ wobbly, too; and even as the spinstress realised it, her human’s hands were promptly crushed into fists.

The fists were shaking.

“… Yamame?”

“Yes?”

Paran tore his blindfolded gaze away from the black mouth of the poisoned tunnel. He looked down instead: at his still-sitting rescuer.

“… You seem calmer,” he noted.

“A bit,” admitted Yamame. “What about you? You look upset.”

“Not at all. I’m fine. _Gods watching,_ I’m fine.”

“… Did you want a hug?”

The human Paran opened his mouth to answer.

Then, whatever staid, propriety-made response had been forged in the underground vaults of his word-bank, it was smashed into a thousand glass-shard pieces. Paran swallowed them down, gagging from the effort.

“… I think,” he choked out at last, “I think I’m going to need that.”

* * *

Satori Komeiji’s domain was a cyclopean eye, rent in the obsidian rock in a time and by forces inconceivable even to the mightiest _youkai_.

The white – in the absence of a more imaginative term – of this eye was a colossal ring of a cavern; impossibly tall, fissured pillars of dripstone were threaded throughout the entirety of the ring: a forest of supports for the mass of the mountain above. Shadow stalked these woods of stone; but as the underground Capital had its own miniature Suns, so too did this chamber house a brilliant light within. A vast chasm made up the eye’s orange iris; as deep again as the pillars were high, round beyond the reach of coincidence, the chasm was a peek-hole into the molten core of the earth. At its bottom, a magmatic lake broiled with a potent, barely-restrained fury.

Married to the heat rising from the lake, the chill of the underground conjured up lashes of chaotic, differential wind. Yamame braced against them as she descended.

“Almost there!” she yelled over the portentous roaring.

The human inside her embrace made a seasoned impression of a taut, desiccated husk. Not seasoned enough; but for the spinstress, who vied with more immediate concerns, it passed her by.

The eye’s squinting pupil, beside its environs, was grotesquely small; an islet at most, nothing more. A singular finger of stone jutting out the volcanic abyss – yet enough large sill to bear an entire mansion (including its gardens) upon its flattened tip. Those more poetically inclined Oni of the Capital (the same, in the main, who referred to their vicereine’s seat as the “Heart Chamber”) oft claimed Satori Komeiji’s house to be “sunken” or “collapsed.” The metaphor was plain; for the mansion above the magmatic lake had clearly been fashioned by the weather-minded mode of human architecture. Three floors up with a slanted roof, and windows all across. Had the Underworld’s architect not known differently, she could easily have believed the house had indeed rolled in down from the world above in some darker time.

An ancient bridge – pure stonework from end to end – joined the islet to the safer shore of the chasm. Attired with a better (better _yet,_ for faster) alternative, Yamame landed rather in the midst of the mansion’s gardens immediately. Her human, continuing his imitation of old prey, crumpled into a broken heap, and heaved over a bed of familiarly crimson roses.

“… _Never,_ ” he sputtered, past a nauseous few moments. “ _Never_ again, Yamame.”

The spinstress offered him a little smile in compensation. Whether it did compensate or no, the marooned two walked over to where the front door of the mansion stood, forbiddingly closed.

Thus, similarly ticklish in the stomach, Yamame Kurodani pushed apart the double wings omitting a knock, and stepped inside.

To knock, in the first place, would have been without a sense for such a grand-spanning house; even from above Yamame had seen scarce few windows were alight, none of which nearby the entrance. But her earth spider’s eyes had caught something else: luminous fibres of loosed magick energy, wafting on the cavern’s turbulent air. Not snares – for Satori Komeiji needed not restrict her prey physically – but _bell-strings:_ subtle incantations designed to alert the mansion’s master to a foreign approach.

All the more alarmed the spinstress, when who received her inside the deafeningly silent foyer was not Satori Komeiji at all. The great door slipped ominously shut behind.

Two feline ears, knife-edged and tipped with sensory hairs, flicked at the earth spider and her human from atop a head of hair as red as cooling embers.

“Guests who come,” said their owner, “one from near, and one from far. Matters not – little sister welcomes all. Good day.”

The cat-eared creature then pinched the skirts of her grass-green dress, and curtsied in an antiquated way. The dress, Yamame passively noted, was a single, overlong piece. Cut from one, vast sheet of fleece – or other like material – and finished copiously with lace; it hung until the wearer’s feet in a flat, unbroken slope. When raised, two booties – black and hard-shod – were revealed, peering out curiously from under the hem, one before the other for the bow.

Coiling snake-like behind them were the twin tails of a _kasha._

“Rin Kaenbyou,” Yamame recognised. “… Hello.”

The corpse-thief of _Chirei-den_ carried an ill repute among the Capital’s Oni. Not because Rin Kaenbyou’s nature was deplorable in itself; rather, her particular inclinations had led her to socialise with the surface people, from whom the same Oni had cut away. This, perhaps inescapable, association had made the red-tressed cat the most notorious of Satori Komeiji’s pets – beside, anyway, the god-raven and the human.

The corpse-thief of _Chirei-den_ tossed her head, tails weaving sinuously. “Ooo-rin,” she moaned. “Ooo-rin! Those alone who wish mean things should happen to little sister call her by her full name. Those and perhaps Master Satori. Those who are friends of little sister as one call her Orin. So must sister Yamame.”

“What makes you say we’re friends?” asked Yamame. “I’m an earth spider. _Kasha_ and we don’t mix.”

“Simple,” Orin said with a pleasant smile; “yes, it is. Yamame-of-Black-Valley is a friend to everyone. Orin knows.”

The spinstress tucked in her fangs. “… Very good,” she gave in. “Same to you, Orin. _Yamame._ No need for the full name.”

The cat-she curtsied once more. “It shall be even as sister Yamame wishes.”

“I am not your sister, either.”

“No?” Orin set a long-nailed finger across her lips. “Was little sister perhaps mistaken? She has so many siblings, so many: sisters, even a little brother since lately years. Might be she has erred? Might be.” The corpse-thief curtsied for a third time. “Apologies to sister Yamame.”

Yamame throttled a groan. “… We need an audience with your Master,” she cast another net. “Is she available?”

The cat seemed to catch. “Ah! Here is their request. Sadly, Master Satori is… preoccupied, at current. Yes. Most _noticeably_ preoccupied. She may be hours still… depending. Any way it goes, she is not available now. Not close.”

“And her daughter? Could she hear us out?”

Orin laid her ears at the mention of her owner’s overzealous progeny. “Young Master San is unfortunately away,” she said, mournfully. “Though it leans on who says it uppermost of all. It may be she is _fortunately_ away for some; little sisters knows not which way her thought lies. Away, at any rate; taking lessons in the shiny Capital, yes she is. Grows quickly, does our dear Young Master. So quickly… Ah, but sister Yamame needn’t be so glum of face!” The cat-she laughed at the earth spider’s failing expression. “These are but minute obstacles! She may guide them to a room, may little sister. There they may wait, where one has waited before, until such a time as little sister’s Master comes un-occupied. Will they, nil they? Orin wonders.”

The mother of plagues had but to look to her human to see he was ill at ease with… perhaps everything at present. But, ultimately, what other choice did present?

“Nil we?” she asked him, half-jokingly.

“… Methinks we will,” grunted Paran.

“What he said,” Yamame told Orin.

The cat-she glanced incuriously at the sweat-sheened human. Then, she resumed staring expectantly at Yamame.

“… We will, Orin,” repeated the spinstress.

For the fourth time, Rin Kaenbyou lifted her dress and provided an obeisant bow. “As sister Yamame so wishes.”

Then, without waiting so much as for them to clasp hands, the corpse-thief of _Chirei-den_ started down one of the dozen dimly lighted halls.

* * *

The cat-eyes of Orin had proven an ally above allies inside the mansion’s mirror-same corridors. Though little did Yamame doubt her own spider’s acuity could retrace their steps to the foyer; but to have located the one desired room among a hundred identically-doored was a feat subject to envy. This, or like her Master, the corpse-thief of _Chirei-den_ had played at tricks complex even beyond the earth spider’s mind.

As they had walked, and Yamame had been studying the curious, glyph-like tiling of the mansion’s floor sliding by, Paran as well had given to his own curiosities. In he had leaned, and whispered into the earth spider’s ear:

“ _… Black Valley?_ ”

The warmth of his voice – his precious voice – crashing on her skin had all but caused her to forget about floors entirely.

“It’s—” she had murmured back, “It’s what my family name means, when written in _Gensokyo_ ’s script. It was… probably… where I was born.”

“I’ve not heard of any Black Valley.”

“It’s probably nowhere close. I’m not sure if it’s _anywhere,_ still.”

“Except in your head.”

Yamame had giggled – quietly. “It is a nice name. It made me feel like I had my roots put down somewhere. That I was a person – not a sickness in the wind. It was something that kept me going… well, after I’d come to the Underworld. I needed an origin point. Somewhere I could call my birth-place. Somewhere I could loop around to – even if I never will.”

“… I see.”

“Isn’t it the same for you? Maybe you’ve put your true name someplace where I can’t catch it, but you are, nevertheless, Paran of the Human Village. That is where you loop around. Would that make you… Paran _Ningensato_?”

“… That isn’t what it’s called, Yamame.”

“Someday, you will have to tell me what it is.”

The room where Orin had led them dutifully had by earmarks been meant for guests. A single, royal-sized bed took up a half of one wall; otherwise, a writing desk, a bookcase of some content, and a vacant dresser occupied the remaining space. The floor was clean, soft-carpeted. As well to reinforce the purpose of it as a guest-room, the cat-eared denizen of the house had curtsied for a final time, and fled, as soon as completing her task.

Yamame Kurodani, squealing delightedly, unhooked from her human’s grip, and hopped over to flump bodily onto the bed. Here, too, the guest-ness of it all was in cushioned evidence; and the bed, which Satori Komeiji had delegated to those rare visitors, was downier and more comfortable than Yamame’s own.

 _At least,_ she mused with less delight, _while it still was._

The spinstress, soured by the thought, sat upright in the borrowed covers, and looked to the end of the room where the human Paran was nervously pacing.

“Paran?” she called out to him. “Is something wrong?”

Her beloved human stopped. Then, he was pacing again.

“… It’s just filtering in,” he muttered.

“What’s filtering in?”

Paran paced another full course before replying. “Where I am. What I’m doing.”

“You’re here,” Yamame offered. “Scuffing a hole in the floor.”

“That’s not it.”

The spinstress shaped a wan smile. “I know,” she said. “I was joking. Can’t I? I don’t know how else to help.”

The human, who hadn’t before, now reached for his blindfold and jerked its binds loose. His eyes at once screwed up at the orange light intruding from beyond the window. In a few, impatient sweeps, he yanked the curtains close. The room became a little more shadowy.

Then, at last, he looked directly at Yamame.

There was no love in that look.

He had gorgeous eyes, even now; but they were so dark and a-swirl with fear and insecurity, no ray of love was filtering through. There was no overt allegation inside; but though Yamame put her entire heart in her returned gaze; though she pleaded with him mutely to forgive her; all the same, she could not deny the insidious thought that she had perhaps strained his trust too far this time. That, by pursuing the convenience of Komeiji’s quicker involvement, she had shoved her human too deep down the Underworld’s indiscriminate jaws.

Was this where she wanted him to be? In these inimical realms? _Yes._ Yet between the two permissible, she had put him in one with which the human was dismally unacquainted. The Capital, she realised all too late, would at least have been explored before. Here? As good drop a spider in an empty glass and watch it fumble. So was it for humans in the Underworld.

And yet, even these guilty thoughts were pushed through the gaps in her internal webbing when the human, having paced one final round, approached her instead – and knelt at her side by the bed.

With no preamble whatsoever, he deposited his messy head onto her lap.

“Pa—Paran?!” Yamame startled when his arms were slipped around her waist. “Um, what—”

“It feels safe here.” He breathed the words into her clothes. “It’s warm, it smells nice, and it feels safe.”

“Are you mocking me?”

“I’ve never.” Her human rubbed his chin left and right on her thighs. “Made fun of you, yes. Never mocked.”

Against her tenseness, Yamame let go of a small chuckle. “You’re as bad as Ashi is, did you know that?”

“She loves you,” Paran reminded. Then, quieter, he added, “ _I_ love you.”

That made the apprehensions melt.

A rush of warmth, happiness and fulfilment working up from her tiny heart, Yamame Kurodani wove her spinstress’s fingers through her human’s matted hair. The hair was hot, greasy, and not a little gross at first; but when the human sighed contentedly and sank against her with unaffected trust, there was nothing else in the world (even if only for now) which she wanted more under her hands.

Slowly, with care – as he had done it to her many times before – she scratched along the tough skin of his scalp. She cooed a happy little song that needed no words (nor had any); and sooner than she may rethread his confession for the thirtieth (or so) time over in her head, the human Paran had lapsed into a sedate, undefended nap.

A clock-less wedge of an hour hence, a tap was sounded on the door. A measured hand rested on the handle, and the door smoothly inched ajar.

Framed inside it, her cat-maid in obedient escort, was the most hated among the Undeworld’s cast-out.

The vicereine of Old Hell, the eldest of her name, judge and counsel to those estranged under the earth, the dreaded mind-reader, Satori Komeiji, was a tiny, almost insignificant-looking woman. Though the most recent upheavals of her life had seen the eldest Komeiji adorn a healthier complexion and additional stuffing in her flanks; even so, Lady Satori – so-called by those less censorious of her subjects – could readily have disappeared inside a group of human striplings. The tired, pale-blue smock she was wearing and the likewise faded, flower-patterned skirt admitted her only a modicum of stateliness. The part-translucent shawl circled round and round her neck gave her the appearance of drowning instead.

It had to be said, all the same, that Satori Komeiji was dignified in her own, separate right, and Yamame respected her above all.

“Spare me,” said Satori. Her voice was hoarse, as if she had been speaking to someone at great length and volume. “ _Spare_ me,” she repeated. “And you,” she said to her cat-evasive pet, “Stay.”

Orin flicked her steeple-like ears, but shut the door, and stalked behind her Master as Satori went to draw the chair from the desk. The small vicereine sat down weightily.

“… What have you gotten yourself into?”

Yamame cast sheepishly down at her slumbering human. Satori shook her head.

“Not _that_ ,” she said, faint mirth stamping her spinel-pink lips. “As a matter of fact, I would have been a boundless hypocrite to hold this against you. You know that he is _not_ asleep, however. Yes? Quite awake, in fact.”

Yamame blinked her incomprehension.

Satori made a shrug. “He likes it there, but did not think you would have let him stay like that if he hadn’t pretended.” The small governess paused. “He thinks you smell like home. He likes it very much.”

The spinstress looked down in time to see her human come away with the crinkles of her dress pressed as red lines into his face. The face was scowling.

Satori Komeiji summed it up with a self-satisfied smirk. “Those measures may have worked on lesser of my kind. I am older, and more nimble as well. As a matter of fact, I have plucked more secreted thoughts than those you are having of our dear Kurodani. Chant your school-books at me all your heart desires; in the end, you are as good wearing it on your sleeve. No need for frowning, is there? After all, she is the prettiest spider there is, hmm? Isn’t she just, _Nao—_?”

“ _Paran,_ ” growled Paran. “My name is _Paran._ ”

“You have a number of those, then. How very, _sickeningly,_ nostalgic.” The vicereine touched a weary hand to her brow. “Men! Make one, and they’ll make themselves a dozen. Rin.” She fanned the same hand at her waiting pet. “Take this one to the bath, why don’t you? I’m not going to; I don’t want to repeat that particular mistake. I need to speak with Kurodani here, anyway.”

Orin’s tails swished. “Take whom, Master Satori?”

Satori fixed the corpse-thief with a steady glare. “I don’t care this one _doesn’t_ smell dead, Rin. He still smells awfully. Your hobbies are for your own time. Take him, or I won’t have breakfast made for you tomorrow.”

The cat-she made as though to grip her dress and bow, but threw the skirts down at the last second in frustrated defiance. Still, she flitted out the door, headed, imaginably, for the ordained bathroom.

“You had best go,” Satori told the staring human. “She won’t harm you – but she won’t wait for you, either. You’re too lively for her tastes. Go!”

The human Paran stood up. Yamame, at once, followed.

The eldest Komeiji switched her fix to the spider. “Stay, Kurodani,” she urged. “Nothing is going to happen to your lover; if it does, then you have my permission to pull the whole mountain down on our heads as revenge. I’ll even have Utsuho and the rest stand down. I promise. And you, you idiot spider enthusiast – go, already! Scoot! Why are you men so damnably thick-skulled?!”

The man did scoot – though not before throwing a guilty, parting look at Yamame. Then he was gone.

The small governess slumped tragically in her chair.

Yamame sat back down on the bed. “… If this isn’t the best time,” she offered, “then we can come back later.”

Satori Komeiji swatted the offer out of the air. “That… self-effacing servility… may impress your Oni friends, Kurodani, but not me. No. As a matter of fact, it thoroughly disgusts me when people of your standing don’t dare to give themselves the esteem they’re due. It makes my teeth ache.”

“But you look—”

“You’ve irritated my plans for the evening, Kurodani,” Satori replied with an arch smile. “I am upset at that, and I make no apology for looking like it. But would you have come otherwise? Would you ever have come if you had known I’d had plans laid out already? No, Kurodani. This is also part of my responsibilities. It’s the duty I bear with my titles, this mansion, and all. My plans can wait. Tell me what happened.”

“Yamame,” Yamame said.

“Excuse me?”

The spider spinstress pursed her mouth. “Yamame. You asked, in your letter, if you could address me by my first name. I never wrote back no.”

Something lurched behind Satori Komeiji’s perfectly guarded expression. The small vicereine’s penetrating, amethyst eyes seemed to soften and go a little wide; and her cheeks suddenly blushed a very pale, almost indiscernible pink.

“… Very well.” Satori Komeiji made a nod, her face overall a bit bemused. “Please, Yamame. Tell me what has happened.”

* * *


	29. Chapter 29

As with the younger one once, Yamame Kurodani quit the room containing the eldest Komeiji – a time later – possessed of a re-patched overlook of things.

As her daughter had once, so too had Satori Komeiji made for a rapt and graceful audience for the earth spider’s unnerving account; attentive – if not amazed – she had listened to the spinstress describe the chain of events parading up her predicament. Though the vicereine’s Third Eye, suspended in a lattice of fleshy cords at her chest, was black-gazed and baleful; but if Satori had found a tangle in heeding both of Yamame’s voices at once, then she had sewn around it with never a snag. Only once, as the spinstress had been recalling the frightful fate of her home, had the eldest Komeiji interjected.

“One moment,” she said, one white palm raised flat. “What did you say it was? _Eaten_?”

Yamame Kurodani chewed on a lip. The association had not been wholly advertent.

“It’s just what it put me in mind of,” she explained. “Because it seemed melted from inside.”

“Because that’s how spiders feed?” Satori asked.

“Most of them. Some do it… differently. Me, I haven’t—”

“No, you haven’t,” Satori agreed, smiling a knowing smile. “As a matter of fact, Oni would have tasted foully, and you had no appetite for those oh-so-hateful humans. Why, but isn’t there one who doesn’t hate you now? How would you have eaten him?”

Yamame gaped at the openly treacherous question, hurt welling up in her chest. “I would never—!”

“No. As a matter of fact, no. You wouldn’t. Forget I mentioned it.” There was another smile – less knowing, and more sympathetic. “You are a little too easy to tease, Yamame. It’s not an evil quality, but it can smother you under misunderstandings if you don’t take it in the loop. There are times when a barb isn’t a barb, but… something that isn’t a barb.” The small governess waved the slip away. “Maybe not a compliment, either – but the next best thing. My… husband… for instance, calls me small or bony at times. I realise this is true, and I realise he may have preferred I was less so; but, since neither one of us can do anything about my shape, he only points it out every now and again as a way of coping with these perceived flaws. I _act_ offended, of course – but not to the extent he thinks I _really am._ ”

“That sounds dishonest,” fussed Yamame.

“It’s a game.” Satori slightly lifted her shoulders. “The only catch is, we both win. He gets to make it up to me. I get to confirm he accepts me as I am – flaws and all. If it’s the earth spiders’ diet to obstinate on flattery alone, by all means… I’m sorry. We were talking about your eaten house. What else stood out to you?”

The remainder of the story was pointed and short. As it had ended, Satori Komeiji, leaning back, broached her own conclusion.

“The way I see it,” she said, “this is what we should do. The very first thing is I’m going to need more details to go by. As a matter of fact, you absconded the scene a little too soon for anything telling to register. Yes, yes. I know. It was melted down and stank of spoilt food, and you had… other things, shall we say?… to mind right then. Nobody is condemning you for that. Still, I’m going to need a clearer picture before I – excuse me – throw up any allegations. I’d much rather this remained an inside issue, so… I’d like to send someone up from our side.”

“I don’t know that’s a very good idea,” Yamame protested. “The poison was—”

“So it was, yes,” agreed Satori. “Very strong. As a matter of fact, it is as you said: it’d be for the best if we waited for it to simmer out before we blunder on in… Unless,” another option loomed behind the vicereine’s violet eyes, “we sent in someone more naturally resistant to this sort of unpleasantness. More acquainted, if you will. At least, in theory.”

“My—”

“Your siblings, yes. Mind,” Satori cautioned, “I cast no judgement when I say this, but there is a slim possibility one of them may have done this. It’s terrifyingly easy to antagonise a spider, and your younger relatives are almost legendarily inconstant. If I had my _best_ choice, I’d like it if you could go back and have another look, but… It’s no hard guess it might be difficult to persuade you to leave in your current state.”

“One of my sisters can go,” Yamame quickly assured. “I trust them.”

“Any ones you trust _more_ than others?”

“Hachiashi never let me down yet.”

“Jet-haired, ruby eyes, dimples that make her look impudent, insufferable sense of humour…” The small governess filed away the finer details of Yamame’s mental image. “… That should be enough to pick her out. I’ll send Orin up first thing tomorrow after breakfast. It might be worth the side trip to seed the news in the Capital as well. Those Oni drunkards do love you; they may feel compelled to do some snooping on their own time. You are, more or less, one of them.”

Yamame felt an Oni-red blush crawl out onto her cheeks. “I’m not that popular.”

“Were you asking for my help, or did you want to do it the snail way?” Satori folded her arms. “As a matter of fact, now you’ve brought this to my attention, I’m closing off the snail way. We’re doing it as I’ve decided, and that’s final.”

“And what about us?” Yamame asked. “What about me and Paran?”

The vicereine cocked one small brow. “What _about_ you?”

“Are you going to let us wait it out here?”

“Aren’t I? This room is fine, isn’t it? Or did you want another? I’ve to tell you, though – there are hardly any tidier than this. It’s a big house to keep clean.”

Yamame gave an almost startled shake. She bowed her head. “No! It’s fine. It’s very, very fine. Thank you, Lady Satori. We will be a couple of days at most, I promise. We won’t be trouble. As soon as the poison has cleared out, I’ll take him back, and—”

“ _Yamame._ ”

Yamame looked up. The frown on Satori’s pale face was disapproving – even disappointed.

“This mansion has about one-hundred-and-five rooms like this one, give or take,” she said. “It has four big kitchens, half a dozen smaller ones, a full dozen bathrooms, two ballrooms, and at least one basement I can attest to existing. There are probably _leagues_ of corridors taken together. I have a library here that rivals anything on the surface. When the _Yama_ forgot to have this place demolished, ages ago, they left behind everything – walls, floors, furniture, carpets, books, documents, personal effects, even clothing. What is _one room_ to me?”

“The _Yama_?” Yamame was confused.

Satori gave a little smile. “You didn’t know? It’s a fascinating little sidelight on the story of this place – if a bit humbling. This place, _Chirei-den_ – the Palace of Earth Spirits – used to be a vacation house for the bureaucrats of the Old Capital. That is an entire city of overworked push-quills it once had to accommodate. _Someone else_ could probably tell you the story in full better than I. Anyhow, my point, Yamame, is that I could host you twenty times over and scarcely even notice the loss in living space. Your Oni friends could throw a party in the farther chambers, and I may never find out – until I trip on the debris one day.”

“That could happen,” Yamame chuckled.

“It may have already.” Satori shuddered. “Anyhow, even imagining this wasn’t so, and that I hadn’t expressly communicated my willingness to help you, there is still a third factor.”

“What’s that?”

“My daughter.” The small governess sighed. “San has run into this idea, see, that we – the Komeiji – since we are technically the governing force here, that we should take a… _more active stance_ … in any and all incidents that pop up every now and then. She treats it very seriously. Why, if she heard that I turned you away… As a matter of fact, she may just decide to shriek my ears off. She has her father’s lungs, but a little girl’s range. It’s horrible.”

“Orin said she was in the Capital,” Yamame remembered.

“Yes. She’s taking classes in spell-scribing from a castaway _yamanba._ My grasp on incanted magic is tenuous, and my pets are too elemental to teach her their methods, but she finds the concept of witchery somehow very romantic. I couldn’t tell you why. There are abstractions in that girl’s mind even I can’t dig around, and she’s become extremely skilled at keeping me out.” Satori’s brows suddenly crashed together. “… Yamame. We weren’t supposed to talk about San. We were talking about _you._ Stop distracting me. Very plainly, dear earth spider, you have in your care something that commands a unique consideration here in the Underworld. This is a consideration for which _Chirei-den_ is uniquely equipped. It has been for a while. Here is very well the safest that something may be in this place. Other than your home, I suppose… but we both know – or don’t know, yet – what happened there, no?”

“Then you’ll let us stay?” Yamame wanted to confirm.

“Then I’ll let you stay, you silly Oni-spider,” Satori answered. “It was never a question of if. I’d have helped anyone – for varying reasons – but having _you_ come to me is the greatest thrill. Among all the souls in the Underworld, it gladdens me the most that beloved Yamame wants my help. As a matter of fact, it almost makes me feel not-hated… Speaking of, though.” The tiny vicereine tilted her head and tapped her nose conspiratorially. “Say. Since we are waiting for your special something to be brought back anyhow, why do you not tell me a little more about it? San has told me a few choice snippets, but I’ve seldom had the opportunity to listen to someone in a similar circumstance to one I once was. How-ever did the feared mother of plagues do this to herself?”

And so, issue of this request, Yamame had begun to explain exactly how she had.

It was as she was harshly criticising the warped door with which good Hijiri had saddled her for the latest project that Paran was, at last, returned from his bath.

Yamame’s beloved human had been skinned of his dirty clothes, and wrapped inside a delicately embroidered bathrobe of silver and pearly white. His hair had been mostly dried; it stood, in a fluffy clump, atop his head, and smelled very good even from afar. Orin swished in behind him, tails curling – for all outward impressions denying the man’s persevering existence altogether.

Satori scanned the refreshed Paran over. “I see you’ve helped yourself to some spare clothes.”

The man sketched a shrug. “Your cat- _youkai_ said these were for guests.”

Orin’s tails whipped. “Little sister has said no such thing.”

The eldest Komeiji laughed them down. “You two are off to a sparkling relationship, aren’t you? Try not to sparkle over any carpets. Yamame,” she called the earth spider, “Your turn? As a matter of fact, let’s make this a statement. Your turn. I don’t care all too much if _he_ likes it; I think you’re overdue for a bath myself. Orin, if you will very well please. After that, you’re free.”

This time, the cat-she drew a full and proper bow. “It shall be as Master Satori wishes,” she said respectfully; “for Master Satori is kind and understanding. Sister Yamame?”

The spinstress hopped up from the bed. Paran’s eyes bolted her to the spot.

“Are you leaving me here?” he demanded. “With _this_?”

Almost Yamame had opened her mouth to chastise this selection of terms; but Satori Komeiji’s mouth was quicker and more seasoned.

“You—” the small governess began.

And then, quite matter-of-factly, she called him a word which made both his and Yamame’s extremities wilt.

The owner of the destructive vocabulary smiled at their combined reactions. “Good,” she said. “Now we’ve swapped insults, perhaps we can talk civilly. Paran, dear – or whatever you want to be – I’ve known who you were and where you stood since I laid my deuced three eyes on you. Had I _but wanted_ to use that at your loss, I would have done so already. I haven’t. I know what your… Hieda-lady… wrote about me in her little compendium. A wealth of that information is out of date.” Satori aped the human’s shrug from before. “As a matter of fact, you did well to study the Underworld before you came in to sweep our dear Yamame off of her feet… but you see, even here, the world doesn’t _just stop._ There have been developments. Why, I’ve even gotten a husband, did you know? Well, no rings, though.”

Yamame saw her human’s brows shoot up. As well did Satori.

“Go, Yamame,” she hurried the spinstress. “Quickly – before I lose his interest.”

“Curiosity,” Paran corrected – even as he took up Yamame’s spot on the bed. “My interests lie elsewhere… As you know.”

“That is very well,” countered Satori, “because ten minutes is about all I can spare for smoothing out your irrational fears. I’ve something better-looking than you – if just as impatient – waiting for me in my bedroom; and I’m not about to let this evening go entirely to waste. Well? Will you deign to perhaps address me as a person now? _Paran of the Human Village?_ ”

“… Very good,” Paran consigned. “… _Mistress_ Komeiji.”

“That makes me sound so old,” Satori complained.

 _Can I go, in that case?_ Yamame wanted to ask – but the human Paran was not holding her with his eyes anymore.

That was when she stealthily quit the room.

As she clicked the door close, and turned to follow Orin’s _clack_ ing booties down the long hallway, Yamame Kurodani patched over a certain long-sewn and moderately well-washed opinion.

Satori Komeiji was _not a snake._

The sloppily-dressed, thankless vicereine of Old Hell was a diminutive creature, which had naturally to be compensated. The was no Oni alive (nor vengeful spirit dead, nor another member of the underfolk in any intervening state) who would respect the eldest Komeiji’s dictates had they not been backed by something otherwise than her empty titles. So the teeny vicereine threatened. So the tiny governess extorted. So Satori Komeiji – she whose pets matched her out in strength – had forged her sole advantage into a weapon none in the Underworld dared cause to fall upon them. The big-headed Oni may pride themselves on their honesty, but even they had thoughts most guarded; spirits did just the same, and everyone else as well. There was not one wretch in the Underworld who did not have a rotten secret of one stripe or another concealed.

Satori Komeiji knew them all. Not _told._ But _knew._ And that was enough of a deterrent.

Though her _personality_ was all the same not one with which Yamame Kurodani would drink herself into the wee hours; even so, Satori _had_ heeded the earth spider’s troubles, and shown to be appropriately concerned. Not shocked, perhaps; but perhaps it lay not within Satori Komeiji’s responsibilities to be shocked. Her influence would still be lent in solving the case of Yamame’s ruined home, and that counted for everything. That, as well as the shelter she promised the spinstress and her human.

The one stitch yet unknown was whether Satori Komeiji could convince the human Paran, who hated _youkai_ on very good principle, that there were those in the Underworld warranted of his trust (and love?) other than the one Yamame.

An ugly, oily kernel of a hope bubbled up from Yamame’s tiny heart as she walked, that Satori Komeiji should fail.

* * *

Whether she had or no was a puzzle Yamame Kurodani took even as far as the bed that evening.

Might be it was for Satori Komeiji was no more in attendance in their room; but the human Paran – who Yamame would precious sooner he trusted _her_ first of all – was standing in an intense study of the room’s bookcase when she returned. Her beloved human had grown into his silvery bathrobe; and he sounded all but disdainful as he jabbed a thumb over his shoulder at a heap of clothes piled up on the writing desk’s chair.

“Clothes,” he offered helpfully.

The spider spinstress smiled. “Have you stolen these as well?”

“Lady Satori did.”

 _That is your final address?_ wondered Yamame. But, for dodging an argument she cared scarce for anyway, she went over to the heap.

A glance behind (but the human was turned the other way), and the earth spider slid out of the robe she – as well – had filched from the bathroom’s guest-minded supply. A pick or two (but the clothes were unmerited visually all across), and she chose a clean, white, woollen tunic as her bed-wear. The tunic was wide and cut rather for a more masculine figure; yet it proved to contain Yamame with room to spare, once she had wriggled inside.

“Yamame?” Paran rumbled behind her.

“Mhm?”

He hedged before grunting his question. “… You knew her husband was a human?”

“Yes,” said Yamame, tugging her hair up the tunic’s collar. “It’s subject to a number of naughty rumours in the Capital. Why?”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It never came up. Is it very important?”

Paran ground out a tired breath. “It is, Yamame. We like to know these things.”

“Who’s we?” she asked, turning to face him.

Her human was idly paging through a musty-looking tome of some weight. “ _Men,_ ” he told her. “ _Men_ like to know. It makes us feel safer when something has been explored before… and more excited, if it hasn’t.”

“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” Yamame wondered aloud.

“In this circumstance,” said Paran, “it feels a touch safer. Why can’t I read this?”

Yamame, hovering at his arm, scanned the spiral, fox-tail runework on the book’s rice-paper leafs. “It’s _youkai_ script,” she explained. “It was in use before it became… less degrading to employ human systems for writing. This one takes a lot of ink to say what it wants.”

“Never took _youkai_ for a tale-telling kind.”

“It’s not as much tale-telling as it’s archiving communications. These are likely separate messages that were only later compiled into a book for keeping; you can see the gutter isn’t near wide enough to accommodate being stitched together like this. The page you’re looking at is talking about a settlement of some kind, or truce. It’s hard to read when the ink’s gone crusty like this. Komeiji wasn’t lying; these are really old texts.” The spinstress disengaged from her human and went to sit on the bed. “What else did she tell you? Nothing too scary?”

“Nothing _too much._ ” Paran slammed the illegible book close and jammed it back into its slot on the shelf. “That I am yours, and that she didn’t want the mountain torn down. That she wasn’t quite the monster I’d expected, and wouldn’t poke her dainty little nose into our affairs. That I am, ‘as a matter of fact,’ free to leave if I should want. And, that I am not to pull her cat- _youkai_ ’s tails.”

 _Dainty?_ “You pulled Orin’s tails?”

“Figuratively, Yamame.”

“Oh. That’s all she told you, then? Nothing else?”

“She said to kiss you good-night for her.”

“She did not!”

Paran forced a smile. “It was worth a try.”

The spinstress walked him with her spider’s eyes as he shuffled up to the bed and folded down brokenly atop it. The ensuing shockwave caused her to rise and fall like a small, blond-haired empire. It made her smile.

“Are you so tired?” she asked him softly.

Paran groaned into the covers. “… Tuckered out, in, and every which way,” he rasped. “I’ve been up on my feet since morning, Yamame. It’s been a very long day.”

 _Too long, I’m sure,_ thought Yamame. _I’m sorry, Paran. I’m so sorry it ended up like this._ “We had such plans, too.”

The pearly-robed man sprawled in the foreign-scented covers did not appear to hear.

A minute raced by on a very lazy spider’s legs. Yamame, drawing her own legs up onto the bed, crawled nearer her beloved human.

“Paran?”

The reply came muffled. “… Mm?”

“We’re going to have to sleep together,” she warned him.

“… We are, too.”

“And you are fine with this?” asked the spinstress. “We slept together last night, but… I understand we were both out of light to care. We napped together once or twice, too, before that. I never bit you, either. But, if you want to, we can divide up the bed. You can lie in one end, and I – in the other. If you’ll feel safer, we can—”

“Yamame.”

“What?”

“… I’ll _be_ your human pillow, if you’ll _shush._ ”

Yamame Kurodani, the yearly malady, had rarely been ordered to shut up in such a way it made her want to hug the orderer, rather than give him a nasty sneeze. This, in the very knife-point of fact, might just have marked the first.

So she did hug him. More applicably she _tried_ to hug him; for hugging someone sunk half up their breadth in soft mattress and quilts needled close to what even a spider could call difficult. But she did lie across his back, burying her face in the hair behind his ears, and that had to do.

The pillow Paran smelled very good.

Nothing evil had been disguised in the admission. The simple reality was that Yamame’s human was owner to a singularly pleasant scent. Though his bath and borrowed robes had layered it beneath another – a mantle of soap, and some alien flower which made the spinstress in equal measures annoyed and excited – still the core of Paran’s basic smell was fixed indelibly to his skin. It was a core which Yamame had learned intimately. It was a core which, on some insidious level, had been made into a lining thread of her home. The very home, which – destroyed though it had been – was in part lying at her side (or under it) even now. Thanks to him. Thanks to her human.

The logic was not _wholly_ sound; but logic – as reason – had never been Yamame Kurodani’s strongest malady. It did not spread very far. Sometimes, it lived no longer than a few heartbeats.

Without figuring out why, she shifted her position, and began to nuzzle the human’s ear.

“… Yamame,” groaned Paran. “Stop that.”

Yamame chuckled. “Why? It’s fun. I’m not going to bite.”

“ _I_ am. I’m ticklish.”

“That just makes it more fun.”

She blew into his ear. Her beloved human squirmed.

“ _Yama—_ Stop that!”

“No.” She blew again. “Nooo.”

“ _Yamame,_ ” Paran begged. “ _What do you want_ from me?”

Yamame, for the briefest moment, reined in her teasing.

The inquiry was, after all, legitimate. Her human had, in his humanly chase of misappropriated knowledge, issued her with many a question before which had not been fully so. Not so this. This could be one for ages. It could be a quandary posed in story-books for hundreds of years to come; sleep could be driven from generations of human eyes by a riddle such as this. Already one had fallen prey to its mystery. The question stood on, unrelenting.

What did Yamame Kurodani want?

( ) Something.  
( ) Nothing.

* * *

(X) Something.

 _Something_ was close; _everything_ would have passed closer yet. None prettier – but closer. Yet Yamame Kurodani – who had lived with her selfishness and knew its unbridled stretch – had, for her human’s sorry condition, best to content with the former. _At least,_ she hushed the greedy fractions of herself, _for tonight._

So she nosed once more at her human’s ear. So, entreatingly, she touched her lips to the back of his cheek. So, in the softest of voices earth-spiderly available, she whispered her demand.

“You promised me _something_ – didn’t you?”

The human’s answering quiver registered curiously all over Yamame’s front. Paran, his next breath lifting her up, replied with another groan.

“… That was for home,” was the groan. “When we were on break. After we settled in everything. After I’ve showered and eaten.”

“You’ve showered,” noted the spinstress.

“We aren’t home.”

“We don’t need to be.”

“Nothing’s settled in,” Paran objected. “Last thing I ate was an apple and a strip of dried pork hours ago.”

Yamame smiled. “That’s eaten. Technically. Two out of four is good enough, isn’t it?”

“I’m _ragged_ , Yamame,” her human pleaded. “I couldn’t get up if you lit this bed afire.”

The spinstress giggled into his tortured ear. “So what?” she asked him. “Where were you going to go? I’m right here. Was there something you needed to fetch?”

“… No.”

“Then don’t. And face me, already.”

The human underneath her shifted with a tectonic struggle. The earth spider, climbing up on her knees, gave him the space necessary to complete the motion. Paran rolled around with all the grace of a tipped stack of timbers.

His face was thunderous. It was red from chin to forehead as well – owing, like as not, to Yamame’s fooling; but most of all it was thunderous. It put the spinstress in mind of a glowering Oni. The Oni was roped around the ankles, and strung upside down from the rafters as a drunken prank. The glower was perhaps substantiated.

“… You have no pity,” Paran accused her. “Which part of ‘tired’ gave you the slip? _Ti? Red?_ ”

The spinstress swung one leg over and sat astride him. “You didn’t say you were ‘tired,’” she declared. “You said ‘tuckered out.’ Then ‘ragged.’ The only tucker I know is one you put over a dress. Maybe that confused me.”

“What about rags?”

“You don’t look like one. A _rug_ , conceivably. Not a _rag_.”

Paran stared up at her. “Wit, Yamame? You?”

That made her chuckle. “I _know!_ ” she moaned with feigned despair. “Maybe you’re rubbing off on me? You have been doing that a lot. What-ever next?”

Her human snorted. “Sleep, hopefully.”

“No. Not yet, Paran. Something first, as promised.”

The human Paran let off a long, grinding sigh.

But even as he gave up the life-sustaining air, his hands wandered quietly up to Yamame’s legs. The legs (which her tunic had refused covering up, on account of length) tingled, even as his tough-tipped fingers walked up the length of their thighs. The spinstress shivered. Not at all because her spider’s instincts were up to their dance again. Those had, by now, been mostly inured to Paran’s hands. Mostly. But, for whichever instinct was rearing, Yamame’s shoulders tensed, and a silent gasp slipped out between her lips.

Then once more, when the same hands traced back down toward her knees. They stopped, and waited.

Yamame’s attention slowly rethreaded to her human’s eyes. With a burning sense of shame, she realised he had been closely watching her reactions.

But if they had been any wrong, he had something else to point out.

“… Have you ever noticed this?” he asked. “How this _always happens?_ ”

Yamame willed out her distraction. “Wha— What always happens?”

“This.” Paran drew a circle with his chin, enveloping both of them, the bed, the room, and everything else apparent. “Whenever we… _do things,_ you tend to always end up on top of me some way.”

The spinstress bit down on a lip. “Is that a problem?”

“Only pointing out what I noticed, Yamame.”

“It feels… natural,” she tried to explain. “Not in a _youkai_ sense; but it feels… It’s like I’m… I _just like_ being here,” she surrendered. “I like being on top of you. Is it a problem? Am I too heavy?”

“You aren’t _light_ – but,” Paran added quickly, “you’re soft and warm as well. It feels good.”

“Really?”

“I’m not tossing you, am I?”

“No,” she admitted. “But you _are_ tired, aren’t you?”

Paran clicked his tongue. “… Yamame,” he grunted, “I _like_ having you here. You feel good. You aren’t heavy. You _pretty idiot._ ”

Yamame Kurodani, the pretty idiot, smiled awkwardly at the reappearing compliment. Or had it been a compliment? It was impossible to tell for a surety without a Komeijic access to her human’s heart; but the one certainty presenting was, he at least forgave the earth spider’s ballast and its inexpressible need to rest that atop him. That by itself merited recognition. So Yamame Kurodani, smiling, brushed her hair behind her ears. So the pretty idiot laid her hands flat on her human’s chest. So she leaned down to kiss him thanks.

The kiss was brief – even chaste – meant to communicate gratitude, rather than… well, the usual.

Still, Yamame’s tiny heart puffed up with the same, glowing sense of fulfilment, which she had markedly discovered earlier in the day – while wresting her human away from his work on the road. It seemed, nonsensically, it made no matter why; doing these things alone convinced her silly heart everything was to a measure precisely how it was supposed to be. That all the little bits and pieces of the four-letter-thing she and her human felt for each other were sticking neatly home whenever their lips met. That perhaps, regardless of what she had intended to convey, what she _truly felt_ instead was stubbornly expressing.

But, whether her human felt loved or thanked by the kiss, it was not ever for Yamame to spin.

“… One thing,” Paran was all but whispering. The words brushed the skin of her face, and Yamame opened the eyes she had pleasantly shut, never knowing. Her human’s own eyes were waiting when she did. They were big, dark, a little sardonic, and very tired – but every inch ones she loved above any other. “One thing, Yamame,” Paran told her again, and the earth spider dragged herself out of those eyes. “I’m going to do one thing. Then, I want to sleep. OK?”

The spider spinstress grinned happily. “And if you try more than one?” she teased. “Should I punch?”

“I won’t,” Paran assured her. “I won’t,” he assured again, for some reason. “But, you’re going to have to do as I say, if you want to stay on top.”

Yamame sat up and squeezed her legs around him in readiness. “Say away.”

“Very good. Kiss me.”

She blinked. “… What?”

“Kiss, Yamame,” Paran repeated. “I want to ease you into it. Kiss me, same as always. Then I’ll start. Very good?”

The spinstress made a shallow nod. “… Very good.”

 _As always,_ she span the phrase over inside her head. It struck her, somehow, as wrong; it was, factually, wrong – even discounting the fact they had been kissing but for a week or two at most. Yet she did bow down anyway, did Yamame Kurodani, closed her eyes, and her human was obediently given his commanded kiss.

And there, again, was her heart – puffing up in joy as soon as he was. It really seemed to make no difference what prompted these anymore.

The kiss lingered; and even as Yamame (who did not mind overmuch unmaking the error in her human’s words) was approaching the upper end of confusion, something weird – warm and slightly wet – prodded at her squeezed-together lips. _What was that?_ She canted her head in an unspoken question. Her human must not have felt; but there the weird thing was once more – no less wet, but more daring in its advances. The spinstress pushed out at it, but all that did was chase it off. _What’s going on?_

“… _Yamame,_ ” Paran suddenly shaped the name atop her lips.

“Mm?”

“… _Open up._ ”

 _Ah,_ she thought a bit dumbly. _So that was it._

… And then again, _Ah—_ , when she finally let him in.

* * *

A sticky, clumsy, and intensely satisfying minute later, and Yamame Kurodani reluctantly drew away from her human. The mother of plagues, swallowing, wrenched open her keen spider’s eyes…

… And, blushing, palmed away the trace of spittle stringing out between her mouth and his, before Paran followed her suit.

His expression was a touch critical when he did. He exhaled. “… There you have it. Was that any good?”

“It was—” Yamame caught her own breath. “Mm. It was… something.”

“That’s what it was supposed to be. _Something._ You shove too hard, Yamame.”

“I do what?”

“You push too much into… well, into _my side._ My tongue can only bend back so far. It’s nothing awful, just… Think about me a little more.”

 _I was,_ thought Yamame, and was only slightly lying. “… Um. Anything else? It felt… It felt like I was doing well – until you said that.”

“It’ll come to you,” he promised. “Give it time.” Then, he gave her a worried look. “… I’m not going to die, am I?”

The spinstress frowned. “Why should you?”

“Well, you know…” Her human waited. He gave up when Yamame made a pout. “… Sorry. You tasted a bit funny, that’s all.”

He reached up and petted one of her cheeks ahead any further offences might mount.

“… Want to go again?” he offered.

“What about you?” returned Yamame.

“… I want to go again.”

She gave him a winning smile. “Then let’s go again.”

* * *

“… Yamame?”

“Mm. Hold on… There. Yes?”

“That was way better, but… Was all that moaning really necessary?”

“Mm. Can’t I? It feels good doing this, so…”

“It’s fine. Gods, it’s _very fine._ But remember we aren’t at home.”

“I’ll remember. One more, then?”

“… One more.”

“And one after that?”

“… But then it’s go to sleep. All right?”

“All right. Mm… Paran?”

“What is it?”

“I love you _so much._ ”

“… I’m not sure you d— _Mmh!_ ”

* * *


	30. Waking up

Waking up beside someone else was, between the lately novelties in her life, altogether unsensational.

It might have been for it came in partitions. There was the vague linking of consciousness. The syrupy wash of homecoming senses. The slowly filling cognisance of some other-ness nearby… A _click_ of recognition at last, when a familiarly moody face blurred into focus. Yamame Kurodani was all the same unexcited. Comfortable, yes; gratified in some mysterious way – perhaps. But possibly she had overstocked on excitement yesterday, and that was that.

Her beloved human was much still asleep. The plain tell was the lack of dissent vocalised when Yamame flexed one of her legs – which, at some point of the night, she had slung around his waist. Frown though he might his best regular; the eyes beneath his hugging brows were anyway shut tight.

This was an obstacle.

Here, after all, was a fidgety thing. Here was a human who, the last he had been roused by a spider, had fled instantly into the lightning-wracked realms of panic. Here was her beloved Paran, who, in the one situation she had woken him without forewarning, had badly battered his knuckles on her skull.

Here was a man who might well bite off her nose if he woke up to an unheralded kiss.

But Yamame Kurodani was an earth spider, and earth spiders were hunters subtle beyond compare. So she did not kiss him. So she did not shake him. So she did not lovingly speak his name, either; but she did begin to rub the leg tossed over his side softly up and down, and watched his sleeping face for change.

The change did come; and the eldest of Underworld’s spinstresses soon witnessed as the furrows in her human’s forehead grew almost geologically deep. A desperate word popped between his lips. Then, breathing in implosively, Paran reeled; and his beloved eyes were all at once thrown wide open.

For the span of a few distressed heartbeats, the human stared at Yamame’s very close (and mischief-filled) face.

Then, his breath evacuating, he closed his eyes again, and muttered, “… I prefer this one.”

“Nightmares?” asked Yamame.

“… A bad dream.”

“That’s what ‘nightmare’ means.” Yamame pressed a touch closer. “You were scowling up an earthquake. What were you dreaming of that was so awful?”

“It was…” he began. Then, a returning shadow of the dream crashed his brows back together. “… I dreamt a _youkai_ had snuck in my bed,” he said at last.

“Oh?” The spinstress pushed closer still. “What kind of _youkai_?”

“An eight-limbed fiend of some stripe,” sighed Paran, “with powerful legs and big… uh, eyes. Can we not talk about this? I’ve enough _youkai_ harrying me when I’m awake.”

“Is one harrying you right now?”

Paran’s lips cracked into a fatigued smile. “She’s about to, I feel.” He pried open his eyelids, and looked fully on the earth spider – who by now was no more than a three fingers’ breadth away. “If you want to kiss me,” he warned, “no tongue.”

Yamame made a petulant sound. “Why?”

“My mouth’s stuffier than the underside of a cupboard.” Paran’s face approximated a shrug. “It’s probably the air here. It’s very dry.”

“So what? Mine’s no better.”

“All the more reason to rinse it down first.”

“I don’t see anything to drink.”

“That is just too bad, isn’t it? We should ask Lady Satori for a water fountain next time.”

Yamame gave him a venomous look. “… Snake.”

She pecked a perfunctory good-morning kiss on his (truthfully a bit parched) lips, and sought a path up to a sit.

The easiest, of course, would be to follow her over-slung leg and come up atop him; and while the easiest may not have been the mother of plagues’ way, Yamame Kurodani was not above lowering herself to her human’s level of depravity. As she rose, the quilted duvet spilled down the arch of her back; and Yamame, with her spider’s sensitivities, shivered from the fall in temperature from a shared bed to the tepid air of the room. Her woollen tunic held its heat well enough; but her uncovered legs huddled closely about her human, longing for his warmth.

If he had meant to deny her this as well, he was too clever to do so transparently. Yes. He was even smiling.

“See?” he said. “Always happens.”

“That is just too bad,” Yamame replied, “isn’t it?”

He faked a pained squelch. “Oof.”

The spinstress tossed her head. “Any more quips? Hmm? No? Good. Good morning, then, Paran of the Human Village. How are we feeling today?”

“Good morning, Yamame of Black Valley. We’re ambulatory, if that is what you’re asking.” He shifted below her. “Weighty, though.”

“And your interminable fear for oneself? Is it ambulatory as well?”

“I’m weak all over with it.” Paran skewed an inquisitive brow. “Yamame? Why are we talking like this?”

“Well, why shouldn’t we?” Yamame _humph_ ed. “ _As a matter of fact,_ would we really want to wrong her highness _Lady Satori_ with our crude, stuffy tongues?”

Her human rolled his eyes ceiling-ward. “Oh, please.”

“You did call her that,” reminded Yamame. The blunt denial of her not-just-affection moments before had re-stoked the fire under a yesterday’s offence. “You called her Lady Satori – and you don’t even like _youkai_. Or do you?”

Paran made a sour face. “She is your lady, isn’t she? Politically.”

“Mine,” the spinstress agreed. “Not yours. You owe her no fealty.”

“No. I owe her for these clothes, this room, and this bed instead. Yamame, what is this?”

Yamame puffed up her cheeks. “You’ve never called me a lady.”

“You aren’t,” Paran told her. “Ladies don’t work. You do.”

“So?”

“So, no ladyship for you. All right, look,” he swapped the thread of his approach; “I’m at her mercy here. As you said, I owe her no fealty – and she owes me the same in return. That’s the problem. So, if Lady Satori wants to be addressed as such, then – gods watching – I will address her as such. I like her no more than I did yesterday morning, but I’ll even call her ‘Sacchi’ or ‘Your Excellency’ if she wills.”

Yamame blinked. “Then you are going to lie to her?”

“After a fashion.”

“But won’t she know that?”

“Yes,” Paran gave up, “but it’s the directed effort she wants. I’ve been handling clientele for a long while now, Yamame – first for my mother, then for you. I’ve known these types. They know I’m lying, but they’re satisfied that I bother. It’s like a play.”

The spider spinstress grimaced. “That’s disgusting.”

“We didn’t design the world, Yamame,” Paran said sententiously; “we but try to live in it. On this note, has her ladyship been coached by yet?”

 _Coached? What?_ “No. Why should she?”

“She said last evening she’d have us join her for breakfast. She didn’t say where, though.”

“In the dining room?” Yamame guessed.

“Which is?”

The spinstress twisted her head left and right. “I don’t know. I’ve only been here once or twice. Never for dinner. Lady Satori doesn’t _really_ associate with the rest of underfolk. She’s more of a… a hanging threat.” _She won’t like me for thinking this, but she is._ “It works, though – since nobody wants her to get involved. So we play nice. As nice as it’s standard for the Underworld, anyway. Overall, you’re right; we should be honoured. It’s rare for her to stoop to our company.”

“None of which tells us where the dining room is.”

“Lady Satori isn’t dumb. Someone will come fetch us.”

“The waiting game, then.” Paran grumbled his discontent. “The worst game there is.”

Yamame grinned. “That is just too bad, isn’t it?”

“Stop that,” her human snapped – but smiled back.

Yamame Kurodani, a spider with such easily ironed tantrums all but she could use them for tablecloth, pried her attention away from him below her, and peered sidelong at the curtained window.

Waking up beside someone else was novel. Not as novel as touching had been; nor was it much similar to embracing or kissing (although it might demonstrably come in the same sequence). Indeed, between those other novelties visited on her life, it was, all said, unimpressive. It was sluggish. It was sticky, stuffy, and all too prone to disappointing. But even with these pitfalls in mind, Yamame Kurodani wanted nothing more than to goad out its hidden potentials.

This, for instance. All but she would have jumped when it started; but when she looked down, those were her human’s hands, and nothing else, cupping her exposed knees.

“… Yamame?”

The spinstress crushed out a more startled response, and murmured, “… It’s fine. Keep going.”

No assent was voiced. None needed, perhaps; for Paran’s fingers did the speaking for themselves.

It was sign language: mute – but simple to appreciate – and a night familiar. A brief pressing down on her skin to start. A tiny half-circle with the thumbs. A long and tantalising slide up the naked stretch of her legs. A pause at the border of her tunic. Another, more teasing half-circle on the inner side of her thighs. An equally torturous journey down.

Then, up again. Though whatever the signs stood for, the earth spider did not know.

“Yamame?”

“Nn… Yes?”

“… I’d never do something like this to a lady.”

Yamame chuckled, the final note squeezing out as a clipped moan. Her legs inched a little farther apart. The spinstress wedged a thumb of her own between her teeth.

The length of the tunic was openly spooling away Paran’s masculine patience; up and up, his hands were bumping it away, to reveal more and more of those legs he so (allegedly) enjoyed. A handful more such shy bumps, and the patience spooled free. His thumbs hooked under the edge, and jerked the cloth up to Yamame’s waist.

The spinstress, breathing shallowly, lifted on her knees to help him extract the bit pinched under her seat. He did.

… Then, experimentally, he pulled the bunched edge up to her navel.

Yamame did nothing.

“… Yamame,” Paran choked out. His breath was every bit as elusive as hers. “… Are you going to just let me do this?”

“… Why not?” she asked back. “I was going to change out of it anyway – right?”

His eyes flashed alertly to her face. As soon, they flaked back down; for whatever was under the tunic licensed evidently upper interest. His mouth set in a conflicted curve.

“… You _are_ wearing something under this, aren’t you?” he asked at length.

Yamame felt her cheeks flare. “I… I am! You can see that. Can’t you?”

Her beloved human made an ugly throttling noise. “… Yes,” he rasped, “ _down there._ Very cute. What about _up there_?”

“Oh. Um. Well, I—”

( ) Was.  
( ) Not.

* * *

(X) Not.

“… Am not,” Yamame finished. To trim, she shaped a tiny smile. “What dummy wears a bra to bed?”

The human Paran – the sober, steady Paran – looked less steady than he had been in weeks. The curvature of his mouth was progressed into geometric warfare; and had wool not made for a naturally sturdy cloth, then the spinstress did not doubt his fingers would have poked an eight of ragged holes through. At last, Paran’s lips were flattened out; and, with a groan like a great gate shutting, he let the tunic drop back down to the Yamame’s lap.

All but, and the spinstress would have hotly criticised this repealing of promised help (in undressing). Only then, her beloved human – as slowly and punctiliously as a spider might – began to roll the edge of her tunic up into a neat, tightly compressed tube. Yamame watched, tensing each time his cool fingers brushed against her skin. The better swing of a minute had clocked past before the cloth was curled up to the height it had been before the drop.

“Is this fun?” Yamame wanted to know.

Paran’s gaze kept trained on her evenly unveiling body. “… It has some artistic merit.”

“Are you going to be long yet?”

“Art should not be rushed.”

Then he rolled on, at the same provocative pace.

Yamame’s whole exterior itched with impatience. She raised up her arms, and folded them over her head to stave off scratching. Her calves pressed into her human’s sides, and Yamame Kurodani, murmuring, gave a voice to her frustration. But the human was too intent, too transfixed by his own art to pay attention to her begging stare. He rolled on.

… At least, until the most stuffed stretch of the tunic was reached, and his fingers bumped into something _that was not skin._

The art, instantly, became damned; and Yamame’s human, discarding his pride together with his masterpiece, roughly yanked the tunic up to the spider’s chin. The black of her simple, silken brassiere was only matched by the black of his gaze when he swung it accusatorily at her rosy face. Because Yamame could think of nothing clever to defend herself, she began to laugh.

Her laughter hitched when Paran jerked the tunic up over her head, balled it up, and threw it at her face. Yamame grabbed at the cloth, and flung it beside the bed. Then, she resumed laughing.

Paran’s brows were clambering over each other. His lukewarm hands gripped onto her hips – for bracing, apparently, over anything else.

“… Was _that_ fun?” he demanded.

“It was _slightly_ fun,” Yamame offered diplomatically. “Wasn’t it for you?”

Her human, omitting a reply, poured his corrosive gaze at the offending bra. Somehow, somewise, the bra held.

“So,” he grunted. “… What dummy wears a bra to bed?”

Yamame graced the jab with a chuckle. “Well, you see,” she said; “wool is very fine. It’s easy to comb, spin, and it’s warm and comfortable. But when it isn’t combed properly, one ends up with shorter fibres in the yarn, which makes it rougher on the skin when you put it together into clothing. My skin is a little more sensitive than most, so… I wore a bra underneath. It’s a very fine bra – almost all silk – so it isn’t all that restricting. As for why I picked this to sleep in,” she added, smiling; “it was the closest to my normal bed-wear – in form.”

“Left legs free?”

“That’s it.” The spinstress nodded. “I sleep easier with my legs uncovered. It’s just how I am. You’ve complained about this before, haven’t you? Anyway, that’s why. I hadn’t considered the bra would become a problem until just now. I hadn’t considered you’d want to… well, do _that._ ”

Paran briefly followed her motion to the discarded tunic. “… I hadn’t, either.”

“Or had you?” she teased. Then, appealingly, she laid her palms atop his. “… Are you so disappointed?”

The human Paran rested his overloaded eyes. His wide chest swelled up with a lenitive breath. Then, he released it in a long, trailing capitulation. It had done its work; and when he looked once more at the earth spider perched atop him, it was not with anger. This time, his gorgeous eyes were calm, even appreciative – in a sarcastic sort of way.

“… Not so much,” he told her. “At least I know why you feel so soft, now.”

Yamame, beaming happily, dug her knees into his ribs. “Are you calling me fat again?”

He slid his hands up her flanks in estimation. “… Chubby, at best,” he opined.

Yamame smacked him. “Snake. I’ll have you know I’ve sisters both smaller and heavier than me. And they don’t even eat as often as you and I do.”

“I’ll believe,” allowed Paran. “… You’re still a bit round, though.”

“But you still undressed me,” the round Yamame pointed out, “even though I’m chubby.”

“I love how you look any way you call it, Yamame.”

The spinstress let go of a dramatic sigh. “I know,” she said. “I _know_ you do. It’s gotten _really_ bumpy where I’m sitting.”

The human Paran – the staid, well-balanced Paran – abruptly lost his stability. He appeared to buck and flip inside-out without ever actually moving. He pitched with a violent cough; and the colour that took up on his face was so dark, all but it put Orin’s carmine braids to shame. It was, on the whole, all rather artistic.

“Yamame—” sputtered the artist, “That’s not—”

“If,” Yamame overruled him, “If you’re about to tell me it’s only some small animal slipped inside your robe – don’t. I know what it is. I’m not _clueless._ I’ve seen males… nude, before.”

Paran controlled his tint with difficulty. “… You have?”

“The Oni,” reminded the spider. “The Oni drink together, sleep together, and bathe together. I lived as one of them for very long. It was inevitable I’d end up coming along to the bath-house every once in a while. You remember – the bath-house in the Capital? Well, I don’t know about up on the surface; but down there, we don’t bathe inside our clothes. So, yes. I’ve seen some things. _Those_ things too.”

“… Oni?” Paran repeated.

“Yes,” Yamame confirmed. “Oni.”

“… Way to make a man feel inadequate,” he muttered.

“What was that?”

“ _Nothing,_ ” he grunted. “Nothing, Yamame.”

Again – it appeared for nothing more than structural support – his hands grazed down and locked about her hips; and her beloved human started the long process of recovery.

Yamame Kurodani the round (not fat) watched on, all bemused, as he began to strain from neck to abdomen, as though drawing the blood up by force from the region which had caused him this latest embarrassment. On a rogue whim, the spinstress feigned a tiny cramp in one of her thighs, and _ever-so-slightly_ readjusted her seat.

Paran’s expression fell as his efforts were instantly undone. He glared up at their destroyer.

“What?” asked Yamame.

Her human yielded, his body going limp all over ~~(except one part)~~.

“… If nothing else,” he delivered his last, hopeless argument, “If nothing else, then this proves I wasn’t lying.”

“About what?”

“About you being attractive.”

A foolish grin pushed Yamame’s cheeks out. “Am I, really?”

“Insanely.”

“I must be,” she giggled, “if you’re reacting like this.”

Paran’s face became a bubbling bog of misery.

A pause came on. It was one the spider and her human spent more idly soaking up each other’s body warmth than anything nearby getting ready for coming out of bed. The orange light outside the window was dim, sunset-like, and rendered the guest-room in a lovely, muted half-shadow. Yamame’s human was its most lovely subject.

Though his expression was none too enthusiastic for this turn of events; the human Paran was all the same a wonderfully handsome sight. His silver-trimmed robe, which he had ended up wearing to sleep, was messily tugged open halfway down his front. There was little else inside that gap but he. His broad chest, only a little less rug-like than Yamame had joked, was surging gently up and down. The criss-cross of valleys and bumps on his stomach was working out in synchrony – growing deeper first, then less whenever he exhaled. The tiny play was captivating beyond any excuse.

It was then, perhaps, that Yamame Kurodani made an earth-shaking discovery.

The human calling himself Paran was _a male._

He had always been a male, of course; nor did Yamame Kurodani contravene those blatantly masculine of his features. His shoulders were robust and widespread. His arms were strong enough to move her two-legged form at no expense of effort; and his fingers were tough and very long. He had a slab-like chest, a sprinkling of stubble on his chin, and a pair of brows as fuzzy as gorged caterpillars crowning his eyes. A monument to his already well-evidenced gender, a certain part of him down below was still unashamedly stiff.

But these were the hallmarks of a _human_ male – not a spider’s. And Yamame Kurodani had _ever been the latter._

Why, then, was she so incurably drawn by those arms? Why did she, an earth spider since birth, want nothing else but to be enclosed inside them? Why was Yamame Kurodani, mother of plagues, vainly willing those hands to touch to her face and lace their fingers through her loosed hair? Why did the yearly malady, she who harried humans – not kissed them – wish for a few (many) more good-morning kisses above everything?

This raw, _kinaesthetic_ attraction was not an entirely new thing; for Yamame had allied already with the notion that touching her human felt very good. But that had ever been stored on a neighbouring shelf to her lately realised love. To knit the two together felt wrong – even immoral. To debase their almost magical partnership with these corporal urges seemed to Yamame someway the peak of insulting.

The trouble was, “seemed” was as far as this sentiment extended. When she silently reached out, and obediently he rose up, and his long arms whelmed lovingly about her body, Yamame Kurodani no more had a pride to insult. She was base and low. She was rude and insidious. Worse, for she felt there was nothing greater she wanted to be.

Yamame Kurodani, the worst earth spider of all, intersected her ankles on her human’s back, and nested her nose in a shallow dimple above one of his collarbones. Her crimes against propriety were quietly absolved with a single, hair-tickling sigh from him. Him, who had put aside his kind’s inherent fear, and valued the yearly malady for what she was beneath her terrible names: a person. A woman. A _female_ to his _male_ , species notwithstanding.

It was a liberating idea. That, in itself, was funny – given she could very hardly move where she now was. Yamame chuckled at the gross metaphysical paradox.

Paran alerted (as he did), and asked, “… Yamame?”

“A happy thought, that’s all,” calmed the spinstress. “It’s a happy place, here where I am.”

“… Is it?”

“Isn’t it? You’re liking this too, aren’t you? And don’t lie. I’m soft and warm, so it feels good – doesn’t it?”

Paran sighed again at his own words swinging back to shame him. “… I won’t,” he said. “It feels great.”

“Same here,” Yamame agreed, “even if you aren’t very soft yourself.”

“… Mm.”

The spinstress laughed once more. “Speaking of,” she then said, sneakily off-hand. “Is this doing anything for your problem downstairs?”

Paran breathed in sharply. Then, he blew a deep, disgruntled sound.

“… Nothing good,” he said.

Yamame purred. “Should I help you out with that?”

Her human’s replying voice was rusted thin. “… Yamame.”

“Yes?”

“Please,” he begged, “don’t make me an offer I won’t be able to turn down.”

“Why not?”

“Think,” hissed Paran. “It will be difficult enough to face Lady Satori as it is.”

“Oh.” The spinstress, reminded, made a ruffled frown. “It is, isn’t it? I hadn’t considered that.”

“I didn’t think you had. So, _please_ , Yamame – don’t.”

“But you _want me_ to help out?” she categorically needed to know.

The human Paran shaped a bunch of unflattering words. “… Yes,” he grated. “Yes, _curse you._ I do want you to help out. Satisfied?”

 _Not nearly,_ the greedy spinstress thought. Smiling her most appealing, she grazed up along his chest, and looped her arms behind his wiry neck. Then, weathering the abrasive staring of his fantastic eyes, she craned up hers, and brushed her lips playfully on his.

“… Maybe just a little?” she offered.

The good, well-mannered Paran actually began to swear. There were some inventive terms in his glossary, but none worse than what Yamame Kurodani had had scraping her ears during her long years in exile. She waited, the patient hunter she, until he had sworn himself out. Then, she kissed him one more time. A longer one.

When it was done, Paran was as Oni-red and putty-soft as he had been once his troublesome body mechanics had been first revealed. All required was a closing crop. A precipitous push.

“ _Come ooon,_ ” she moaned. “Tell me what to do. _Anything you’d like._ ”

That broke him.

Her beloved human, rusty red from shame, retreated his eyes to one side. Then, in a voice corroded by the same, he gave up:

“… What you did just then. When I was trying to… And then you moved.”

Against the heat breaking out up her own cheeks, Yamame smiled. “Did that feel so amazing?”

“… It felt really good.”

“Mm.” The spinstress licked her lips. “Yes. It felt… kind of good when you pressed up on me, too. All right. I’ll do that. Could you… Um. Could you lie back for me? It’ll be easier to move like that.”

The human, surrendering to the truth of her words (and who knew to what else), did lie – first to half, then fully down on his back. Yamame, on all fours, crept up over him, until she was above the part of him that was not so much bumpy anymore, but openly tenting.

A tiny, dust-like speck of a doubt wafted onto the tablecloth of her thoughts, that perhaps the silly Yamame – who herself had wheedled her human into this desperate a condition – had spun herself into an unnavigable funnel. The speck was sent flying away by the gasp tweaked out the earth spider’s chest when she lowered herself onto the strained rise in her human’s robe, and felt it give. She lowered still, until she felt the rigid shape below distinctly – squished between Paran’s abdomen and her unmentionables. Her human let go of a twin gasp. His was lined with guilt… and just a hint of harshly reined satisfaction.

Yamame Kurodani, the eldest of the Underworld’s spinstresses, blushed like one of the youngest when her full weight was settled atop her human’s _thing_ and she felt a jolt of pleasure tickling up the inside of her belly. The jolt was alien… but all at once it was not; and Yamame laid one palm flat on her stomach in worried confusion. She nudged her hips a shy bit forward for a test… and experienced the same sensation again, fluttering up from the point of contact. It pinched another unwitting sound out of her mouth.

… And Paran’s as well. Her human slung an arm over his ever-reddening face.

“ _Yamame,_ ” he groaned.

Startling, Yamame stuck halfway into another nudge. “Pa—Paran? Am I… Am I doing something wrong?”

Her beloved human wrenched his trapped head left and right. “… No. It’s just… Your name.”

“It… It is,” she agreed, uncertain. “I’m Yamame. Yamame Kurodani.”

“ _I know,_ ” Paran whimpered “I know. I just… I wanted to say it. _Yamame._ ”

“Oh.” The spinstress felt stupid. “Um. Should I…?”

“Yes.” Paran’s answer was exasperated. “Yes – _please._ ”

So Yamame Kurodani, she with the name, spread her legs a little wider out for a steadier pose, and resumed the vulgar ritual.

And it was in that moment – not a quarter one sooner, though possibly a half of it later – that the door of their private sanctuary was all of a sudden knocked.

Yamame Kurodani, mother of plagues, seized with half her fingers stuck inexplicably below the bands of her underwear. Her beloved human was frozen as well; only his chest heaved on and on, and his other part throbbed indignantly between the spider’s thighs.

The door was knocked again.

The spinstress pried her mouth to answer. All coming out was an old wood-like squeak. Her human made no move – save breathing and twitching.

There was a third knock. But it had a follower this time, and it was a voice. A male voice – young, almost boyish, muddily familiar.

 _“Good day!”_ it called. _“Uh… Yamame Kurodani? Are you awake? Good day?”_

“We—” Yamame croaked. “We are. We are awake.” She cleared out the motes in her throat. “Um, was there something?”

The caller outside the door hedged. _“… An it please you,”_ he said ultimately, _“Satori reaches out with a cordial wish that you join her for breakfast. Would, though, that mine own opinion were heard,”_ he added, _“she did not quite mean ‘wish.’”_

“I think I understand,” replied Yamame.

 _“The foods are all but ready; your servings as well have been prepared. We do but wait now your arrival._ Some of us _in the slips.”_

The spinstress remembered something. “Um. How do we get to the dining room?”

 _“Ah! Therein’s a known tale.”_ The voice affected a ceremonious tone. _“Come, you, easterly of this chamber, and you shall erelong a crossing reach. Walk past it, then, and its sibling farther on also. Take thereafter a turning once more easterly, and seek you the nearby door great-winged awash in delectable smells. There, yes there, the dining hall lies beyond.”_

Yamame grimaced. “Which way is ‘easterly?’”

 _“… It’s right.”_ The speaker sounded faintly put out. _“Go right, then straight past two crossings, turn right again, and seek a large door. It’s through there. Uh… Anything else our guests may require?”_

The earth spider glanced down. “… Washroom?”

_“There is one at the end of this hall. I will leave its door open for you to mark.”_

“Thank you. That— That should be all.”

_“You will be joining us, I take?”_

“We will. Shortly.”

_“As you wish.”_

There was a delay long enough to fit a bow (however illogical); then, a flight of footfalls fading down the corridor. Then, they were alone.

Yamame Kurodani, the eldest among Underworld’s web-spinners, looked bashfully at her beloved human. A delightfully mussed-up one peered back from under his overspread arm. She held the silence, adoring his state, until he resorted to cracking it.

“… A lesser man could hate you,” he murmured.

Yamame made a powerless smile. “What did I do wrong this time?”

The human hid his eyes again. “… I wasn’t that hungry.”

“Is that all? That’s less mistakes than yesterday.”

“It’s not all.”

Yamame’s smile curdled. “I know. It was a joke. I make those sometimes.”

“Your humour has been obscure of late, Yamame,” muttered Paran.

“Maybe,” granted the spinstress. “Maybe it has been. We don’t really _have_ to go, you know. Lady Satori can do without us. I’d just have to genuflect to her about it later. If you want, we could stay and…”

 _… And finish with your thing,_ she thought, but was too ashamed to say.

At any rate, Paran turned his messy head. “I’d like to wash my mouth down, now I know where I can,” he said. “At least that. Something to eat wouldn’t go a miss, either.”

“But you said you weren’t hungry.”

“I’m bound to become, if we keep at it.”

 _Would that take so long?_ “You aren’t going to forget this, are you?” Yamame questioned. “You aren’t going to pretend nothing happened if we stop now?”

“Would you let me, after all that?”

“I wouldn’t let you.”

“Then what’s the sense?” sighed Paran. “I can’t tell if I would let myself, either. But for now, let me go. Lady Satori’s waiting – in the slips.”

The spider spinstress made a face. Though, in the end, she did let him go – wistfully sliding off to the side. The act of disconnection left her feeling cold and unhappy.

Her beloved human scrambled, as though to cover himself up. Then, however – maybe recognising his over-lateness – he rolled to his feet, and threw off his robe completely. Yamame Kurodani, her spider’s heart hammering suddenly up her gullet, walked him with saucer-wide eyes until he began to rifle through the heap of clothing assigned to them by their stately host.

He cast a sidelong look in her direction, and Yamame found her stare fleeing as well as her heart.

“… You too,” he suggested.

The spinstress groped behind for the hook of her brassiere – before her mind parsed this was not what he had meant. She stood up, blushing, and went to excavate a suitable day dress beside him.

They managed to make presentable (he, in another robe, and she – in a flower-spotted frock) without too much stray touching.

They managed to leave their sanctuary, somehow, without pushing each other down.

They managed to arrive in the marked washroom wanting an incident.

They didn’t manage not to make it a longer stop.

But love could wait, otherwise to vicereines, and Satori Komeiji’s call was law.

* * *


	31. The who and the what

The dining hall, so-named, was fabulously modelled. Images of the surface world, enclosed in wreaths of cast gold, were fastened to the scarlet walls; above all, a grand chandelier of half a hundred electric glow-globes was hanging. A long table, enough to seat all of Yamame’s sisters thrice over, ran lengthwise the hall, empty almost all along.

At its far end, three figures mismatched were clustering.

The first among those figures was enthroned in a padded, carmine chair, and presided over the remaining two. Satori Komeiji (who the figure was) watched on, speaking in hushed tones, as the green-clad Orin and a third denizen of the house were busying with final adjustments of the tableware. The last figure was tall, unmistakeably male, and – detecting Yamame’s entry – turned his eyes pleadingly at the tiny vicereine. Lady Satori shook her curly locks no.

The man – whose cropped, wheat-like hair was not unfamiliar to her – threw up his arms melodramatically. Then, finding no recourse but to fall in, the not-so-stranger folded the dishcloth he had been holding over one forearm, and went out to receive the despotic woman’s guests.

Though he had forgone his wanderer’s rags in favour of an unimpeachable evening vest and hose, still Yamame Kurodani braced herself on her heels at his approach. For here was the ghost-like man – the same which had delivered to her Satori’s letter one industrious week ago – whose dreadful pall had all but sent the earth spider skittering for the roof. Lessened here (or by the lack of clothes complementing the image), the deathly messenger was not so deathly; and, even as he halted and shaped a flourished bow (again?), Yamame reeled up enough courage to step out from behind her own human’s shoulder.

The blond man, unfurled, contrived his features into a thousand-magnified apology. “I apologise,” he said, in case either of the guests were thicker than usual. “Satori there,” he indicated, “she decreed I get myself ‘more accustomed’ to visitors. She is incorrigibly oblivious to the reality my handling of those is first of all abysmal, secondly inept. I implore thee, noble guests two, forgive my calling upon you on such brief notice.”

Yamame Kurodani, instantly and irrationally, disliked the man’s overblown mannerisms. Still, for all he _had_ torn short an exceptionally pleasant morning, she was not about to assign blame senselessly.

“Quite fine, old boy,” she aped, repeating something she had read in one of the more useless books previously stashed in her home.

The blond man and the one who was hers both blinked at the earth spider at varying stages of surprise. The blond one, however, screwed up his faculties first.

“We know each other,” he remembered, offering a hand. “You are the spider of illness, Yamame Kurodani.”

“Santuko… Takumi?” returned Yamame, offering up her own.

The one called Santuko (was he?) volunteered a fake smile. Then, taking her fingers in his, he bowed once more… and touched his lips to the top of her palm.

And though Yamame had made ready to curb her over-keen instincts – or to leap for the chandelier, failing… there was all the same _nothing remarkable_ about this human’s touch. There was no reply. _Nothing_ roused under her skin; and Satori Komeiji’s blond partner released the earth spider’s hand with never a report otherwise than dully informative. Yamame Kurodani, not slightly perplexed, registered her own human eyeing her speculatively from the side. Then, she noticed him roll his eyes.

Santuko Takumi tracked the spinstress’s embarrassed stare, and his own expression shed some of its schooled edge.

“Satori has described your circumstance to me,” the blond man said to Paran. He put forward a hand to him as well. “For what it is worth, welcome to the Crone, Old Hell. Your name, if I recall, was—”

“Paran,” said Paran, clasping Santuko’s wrist. “My name is Paran.”

Something unspoken appeared to nonetheless communicate between the two males before Santuko joined the greeting.

“Paran, then,” he acknowledged. “Very well. I am Garion.”

One of Paran’s brows arched – presaging both of Yamame’s doing the same.

“I heard something else just now,” he noted.

Santuko (Garion?) Takumi slid out of the gesture, his mouth tweaking again into a polite smile. “I’ve dressed in ‘Garion’ for many years, and have rubbed its edges and corners enough to wear it comfortably at home,” he explained. “My other names are newer, and still tend to squeak when I turn around too fast. I endeavour thus to break them in. Aye, indeed – whenever possible.”

“What this vagabond oaf means,” huffed Satori, stomping up from behind him, “is that since he cannot lie to me, he makes it an exercise to lie to everyone else. Isn’t that right, Santuko ‘Garion’ Takumi?”

Garion (?) shrugged. “Only keeping in practice, mother.”

“Call me that again, and I’ll twist your ears off,” threatened the vicereine. “You’re a right villain, Garion. As a matter of fact, San is better than you at not offending everyone she comes across, and she is barely five years old last month. What do you have to say for yourself?”

“I wish she were here,” sighed Garion.

“She isn’t,” said Satori; “and you be glad she isn’t, because she would have long had your ears in some drawer in her room.”

“San is a better host than Satori and I boiled together,” the blond man explained to Yamame and her partner. “Withal we are getting on in years she is yet as fresh and gentle as morning grass.”

“Getting on!” The vicereine made a derisive noise. “ _You_ certainly are! As a matter of fact, you are starting to sound like your father.”

“Good. You loved my father. I should not want you to stop now.”

“That is very low, Garion.”

“Old wolf won’t mind.”

“No,” Satori agreed a little stiffly. “As a matter of fact, no. He won’t. That’s what makes this so low.”

Yamame Kurodani, who had seen enough familial spats, knew this one was now in its first (which often were final) lull. She spoke up.

“I don’t get it,” she admitted, bitter. “What _is_ his name?”

“It’s Garion,” insisted Satori.

“Santuko Takumi,” Garion said at the same time.

Satori flashed him a scorching look.

Paran put a cough in edgeways. “… I see the table has been laid?”

Lady Satori and her husband (he had to be) as one benefitted Yamame’s human with their attention; still, Paran kept his own stubbornly fixed on the other man alone.

Singled out, Garion obliged with an answer. “So it has. What about it?”

“Are we taxing your stocks very much?” Paran wanted to know.

The blond man slowly crossed his arms. “Truth told,” he replied, “not overmuch. The mansion is stocked to feed four more beside Satori and I. Then, too, three of those are away. Our lovely San is in the Capital; mighty Okuu is frolicking above like as not; and Koishi, easily-forgotten… Who can tell? Our larder may have gotten fat if not for your timely relief.”

Paran swam past the joke. “Where do you get your food?”

“Orin stocks it as a rule.”

“In our town?”

“So she does. Albeit, on those occasions my legs betake, I at times purchase goods from the settlement under the mountain.”

Paran flaked incredulity. “The _Tengu_ one?”

“Oh no,” scoffed Garion. “No, no, no! Not the _Tengu._ Their lands are beyond the reach of you or I. There be yon a teeny village, see,” he intoned, slipping into yet another voice, “no more’n a handful a’ bare huts’n gardens an’ all – under yon _Moriyan_ ropeway. Them minders an’ ‘gineers wot main-teen it need t’ eat too, don’t y’know. Well, yet I suspect few do,” he revealed, Garion-like again. “Most anyone asked realises in full the ropeway is kept by the _Kappa_ , and the settlement is for appearances alone. Mayhaps ‘tis why they part with their produce unafraid.”

Yamame’s human scratched at his chin. “… Curious.”

“Anything but,” Satori’s husband disagreed. “The ruse is thin and in bad taste. It saves Orin’s back, is all the good.”

“… It might have saved mine,” grunted Paran. “I’ve not been to the ropeway. Where is it?”

“About half a league south-westerly of the _Tengu_ territory. Their guard make appearances to pilgrims riding up to vouch for the goddesses’ long arms. There is a road splitting north from the Pilgrim’s Way at the foot of the mountain that leads one there.”

“I’ve not been up there. Yamame’s home is farther west. The access, anyway.”

“I have walked the spiders’ warrens. I know. Maybe—” Garion broke off. Then, his wanderer’s face lit up. “By chance,” he said, “I keep in the library an assemblage of maps of the Underworld and its surrounds. Mayhaps, your willing, we shall consult those on our dilemma?”

“ _Garion,_ ” chided Satori, wrinkling her brows up at her husband. “You can talk shop until your teeth rot loose later. As a matter of fact, I will want to talk on something private with Yamame, so you’ll have full exclusivity to our other guest in the meanwhile. Or did you perhaps outright want me to starve?”

“You cannot starve,” the blond man reminded.

“Not for want of trying – on _someone’s_ account. If you’re going to stand here and chatter like a hen all morning, then I don’t want to hear another observation on my hips at least for the week. No, I don’t want to hear another observation, ever.”

The vicereine’s husband fingered his forehead. “Satori, love, your hips are fine. Actually, they are very good hips. Only _a jot hard_ when you roll around. That is my observation.”

“Did you want to pad them out or not?”

He flicked his hand in sufferance. “… As you wish. Let us pad them out.”

“Yes. As a matter of fact, let’s.”

The Underworld’s diminutive authority posed out a silent command. The grey-faced Garion, as if automated, allowed her tiny arm to loop through his.

As they started, arm-in-arm, again for the laden end of the long table, the small governess craned her head up, apparently to give her dissembling husband a look filled with absolute and imperishable warmth. Then, however, her amethyst eyes travelled on farther; and the Old Hell’s vicereine, she dreaded by _youkai_ and spirits both, peered back at the stunned Yamame.

And then, the most exalted of her name, Satori Komeiji, winked.

* * *

After their meal was eaten (which meals are, even in Old Hell), their motley party was mercilessly split.

The keen Paran – who had spent half the hour ducking from Satori Komeiji’s field of view, and half eyeing how the cat-eared Orin fawned outrageously over the vicereine’s husband – now at last met his salvation; and as it had been proposed the men tidy up after on the table (then adjourn to their maps), Yamame’s beloved human had pounced on the arrangement which would remove him from the mind-reader’s surrounds. So Satori Komeiji had left the male part of her household on kitchen detail. So the tiny vicereine quit the grand dining hall with a spider and a cat in a file. So she had led – on her small, slipper-clad feet – toward the sliver of space inside the great mansion which she habitually filled.

The private chambers of Satori Komeiji – screened behind a sturdy, oaken shield of a door – were shockingly feminine. A grand, canopied bed of old was central; atop it, cushions and wraps and drapes were stacked, colourful all: yellow and pink and sky-blue, and trimmed with princely widths of snowy lace. A broad wardrobe, exquisitely faced, comprised a half of one wall; winging it – loaded bookcases as tall as the ceiling. The air of the room was delicately scented with perfume; and bathing it in muted orange was the magmatic glow – the same as in Yamame’s room – slanting in past a broad, curtained window. The floor was carpeted and warm.

In a corner, whimsically odd out, a set of two wicker chairs and a likewise table was standing. Satori Komeiji, awash in angry crunching, sank onto one of the chairs. She waved Yamame to the one remaining. The spinstress, gingerly, imitated her hostess. Somehow, the fretful furniture withstood her weight – though not without complaint.

For the count of minutes Lady Satori briefed her cat-maid on what must be done – concerning, at least, Yamame’s home – the eldest of the Underworld’s spiders waited, incumbent, absorbing the mystifyingly homelike quality of the room. Here, marks were, was a retreat not grossly unlike her own (had hers not been reduced lately to a slurry ruin); it was one which Yamame Kurodani’s study might possibly have become – had the spinstress one day taken to clear the floor of creative castoff, stray scraps, and towers of folded dresses. It was a curious connection – and not without its curious insinuations.

At length, Satori Komeiji achieved the desired impression on her cat-eared server; and, the communiqué and relevant warnings both committed, the corpse-thief of _Chirei-den_ pinched her green dress, bowed, and swished off to her task. Alone now (discounting a spider), Old Hell’s frumpy vicereine withered in her chair. The chair put out its thoughts on this at volume, but Satori Komeiji withered anyway.

Then, opening her gemlike eyes, she turned their concerted favour at Yamame.

“… It’s gratifying, isn’t it?” she asked.

Yamame blinked. “What is?”

Satori Komeiji smiled. “When they find us attractive.”

Yamame Kurodani needed but one moment – and one memory from no farther than waking up – to burn to a spidery crisp.

“Is that so shameful?” wondered Satori.

The spinstress, smoking, bunched up her brows. “Since when—”

“Yamame,” Satori sighed, “even if you hadn’t been mulling it over every idle second, he would have been. I can divert my… talent… elsewhere, but not when it’s positively pelleted with those sorts of images.”

“Why didn’t you—”

“Why didn’t I rat you out in front of everyone and each other? Because, Yamame, regardless what your Oni friends say of me, I’m very much capable of respect. And among the souls stranded here in the Underworld, you, of all of them, present something I respect above all.”

Yamame glared her suspicion. “… What is that?”

The vicereine, at first, didn’t answer. Only she laced her fingers together in a gesture, which – on someone else’s hands – might have been mistaken for consternation. At last, it was smelted out; and Satori Komeiji’s spinel-pink lips spoke anew.

“… Will you take a theory?” she proposed.

“What kind?”

“I think,” said Old Hell’s small governess, “I think that _youkai_ like you and I just _want to be human._ ”

Yamame Kurodani, mother of plagues, she who could never be anything else, bleakly stared the smaller _youkai_ down. “That’s ridiculous.”

“… A leap too far, maybe,” Satori permitted. “But consider this, Yamame. When humans settle in a new place, they pursue a number of things to support their continued existence. They seek shelter, food, water, and warmth; and they secure the means of providing themselves with those indefinitely. They build homes; they plant fields; they raise fences and dig wells. But when those prerequisites are no longer a question but a certainty… What do those frail humans do then as a rule?”

Yamame, drawing on her own expertise, supplied, “They read books. They tidy up their nests, write letters, and make plans.”

 _And tease the spiders every now and then,_ she added inside… before remembering who it was across the table.

Satori Komeiji gracefully accepted all the answers. “Quite. But none of those are required by _what_ they are,” she went on. “They eat, because they would die otherwise. They drink because of the same. They build homes, because those facilitate almost every other fundamental. But do they need to read? Do they need, in strict terms, to write letters, make extensive plans, or to tease their cohabitants? Not at all. And yet they do those things. Why do you suppose that is?”

“… I don’t know.”

“What I think,” Satori confided, “is that they do it because it is _who_ they are.”

The spider spinstress frowned. “But you said—”

“ _Who_ , Yamame,” the vicereine stressed, “not _what_. To wit, once the _what_ humans are is satisfied, they set out to find _who_ they are above that. Knowledge, possessions, or certain social configurations – all of these are means of constructing an identity _over_ what is prescribed by their make-up as a species. This is my theory, anyhow.”

“And what does this have to do with us _youkai_?”

“All of it.” Satori spread her hands eloquently. “As a matter of fact, shall we turn it around? Tell me. What have you, Yamame Kurodani, spider of illness, been doing across the most recent months? Other than being teased.”

“I have been… building,” said Yamame, realising as she spoke how outlandish it was. “I have been working. I have been reading books, and educating myself. I have been learning how to… how to handle humans, without biting.”

“And is this what a _youkai_ does?” Satori asked shrewdly.

Yamame bit down on a lip. “… It didn’t seem that weird until I thought about it.”

“But you did it,” said Satori. “And that is precisely what I respect, Yamame. You elevated yourself above _what_ you are… and began to discover the _who_.”

“… Is that so rare?”

Satori smiled again, indulgently. “Isn’t it? Take a look around the Underworld. Show me ten – no, even five – _youkai_ who don’t live on the extreme inside of their skin. Take my Rin, for example. Yes, she is house-broken, I grant you – eats her food from a plate very nicely. And yet, she never strays farther from what she is than the bare necessary to please me. In time, she may very well find passions and loyalties otherwise than those dictated by her species. But until then, in all her aspects, she is only a _kasha._ A _what,_ if you will. Not a _who_. You and I, Yamame… We are _something more._ ”

“… Human?” Yamame dumbly guessed.

This accorded her a chuckle from the mind-reader. “No, visibly not,” she disagreed, touching her Third Eye. “But _there is_ some overlap, and if that compels us to seek company from the other side… Why not? There’s no shame in it, Yamame. As a matter of fact, the only shame there is lies in denying to yourself what your mind and body want you to have. There is enough… latent power, shall we say?... here, in Old Hell, to sustain _what_ we are without need for our additional input. Might be the spirits left behind by the _Yama_ effect this; might be the humans of _Gensokyo_ above have unwittingly been feeding into us even before the unsealing. I could never get to the bottom of this one. But it makes – or should make – for the perfect opportunity to explore _who_ we are, beside _youkai_. The sad reality is, naturally, that very few of us do. I can name but two.”

The earth spider sensed more familiar ground. “You and me?”

“Although,” noted Satori, selfishness perking up her nose, “not to take away from me, my case was far more turbulent than yours.”

Yamame could not restrain herself from asking. “How so?”

Lady Satori’s expression conveyed a world of modesty – mostly feigned. “It’s an overlong and largely irrelevant story,” she said, suppressing a smirk, “one that would, at that, be more intriguingly told by someone else. Not to mention years old. The very short of it is: I decided, one day, to use my talent to help a certain someone recently happened across my home on unrelated reasons. Someone, I knew, with a problem far too internalised for anyone else to solve. Therefore, I spent time with this someone – a lot of time, as a matter of fact – until I had devised a way to heal them. Well, I still didn’t do it myself. I had to resort to instructing Rin – and suffering a deal of pain on my own. But it worked out anyway; and the unfortunate aftermath was, that someone and I realised we loved each other too much to part ways at that point.”

“And that was—” Yamame began.

“Him,” Satori finished. “Although, to be _unequivocally_ fair, the ‘love’ part came somewhat later. I had to evacuate the stasis of this place for a while first. It did pay off, however. I even became a mother. I did have to keep trying an entire winter, but I managed to do it.” The tiny vicereine shaped a smirk. “I got all I wanted in the end.”

“And this,” dared Yamame, trying out her human’s brand of humour, “this is what a _youkai_ does?”

Satori laughed. It was a startlingly girlish laugh, and absolutely free of shame. “Awful, isn’t it? And yet, dear spider, if this is who I am, then I regret it not one bit. Tell me how flighty, irresponsible and sentimental I am; I will have gone to him to bicker and let him hold my hands before you’re a quarter way in.”

“Hands?”

“He likes them.” Satori shrugged. “And I like a good bicker. It weighs out. All in all, Yamame, it boils down to simple admissions. You need to admit to the other person what you want from them, and hear out their desires in turn. There is no deeper secret. It’s all trust, then striking a balance. But first of all, before you saddle your chosen one with your needs, you must admit them to yourself. You _want him to love you_ – don’t you?”

Yamame Kurodani, feeling the point of the conversation swing back at her throat, stiffened.

Still, when she caught and wrapped her darting feelings, the great architect of the Underworld realised the answer had never been any less straight than one of her rulers. Since the day the secret of her human’s name had been broken, she had always silently yearned for his attention. Not always consciously; not always by that name; but when she examined the Yamame of the previous weeks on what she had been thinking, the reply was all the same across the picture. The picture was none too flattering from this angle.

But if – as Satori Komeiji had said – this was _who she was…_ then, perhaps, there was no defence left but releasing the truth.

“… I do,” mumbled the spider. “I want him to… to love me.”

“Intimacy is a part of that, Yamame,” Satori cautioned. “Men are bodily creatures. They extend that onto love as well. You do realise that, don’t you?”

“… I realise.”

“And still you want this?” Satori went on. “Still you want him to love you?”

The spider spinstress choked. “… Yes,” she rattled out, “Yes, I do! Is that so wrong? Am I not allowed to?”

“Is anyone forbidding you, Yamame?”

“… He is,” Yamame gave up. The miserable need to complain – it mattered not to whom – swelled to enormity inside her chest. The eldest of the earth spiders folded her arms on the table, and set her head down atop. “ _He’s_ forbidding me,” she moaned. “He keeps putting up… walls. He pushes me away whenever I think I’ve found a crack. I thought I’d shown him he could trust me, but—”

“But you made a mistake,” Satori chimed in, matter-of-factly. “He brushed very close to accepting you, but then you said something that made him wary all over again.”

Yamame propped up on her elbows. “… How do you know that?”

“As I said, because men are bodily creatures, they carry their emotional wounds on their sleeves. I just have the Eye to see it.” The tiny vicereine leaned closer. “I’ll have you know, you silly spider, that ‘your human’ loves you a lot. Not excluding a few rather shameless ways, either. I’ve been the aim of these kinds of sentiments myself, so I will tell you this outright. You seduced him quite thoroughly this morning. Well done.”

The earth spider’s ears all but puffed steam. She buried her face in her arms.

“That is what it’s called, Yamame,” Satori insisted. “Have you heard the saying? If you can’t take the heat—”

“But it didn’t work!” protested Yamame (into her arms). “So what if I… _seduced_ him? It did nothing. He still pushed me away.”

“That is because your… assets, Yamame, are not the issue. As a matter of fact, by no standard are you not at least pleasing to look at. Why, I’d wrestle an Oni for straight hair like yours. Mine curls up a mess every night I go to bed. It drives me absolutely insane. You are a bit… let’s say _hippy;_ but you should know this doesn’t bother him a lot. By a human measure, you are a healthy, not-too-old woman. Garion thought you were pretty, and he is usually more reserved with praise.”

The spinstress squirmed under the hailstorm of scrutiny. “… Then what is the issue? What am I doing wrong?”

“Now that, my dear spider, I cannot tell you.”

Yamame wriggled her head, revealing one misty eye. What she saw was Satori Komeiji watching her from above with smug amusement.

“… Cannot,” murmured the spider, “or will not?”

The tiny vicereine’s smile smeared wider. “ _He_ has asked me not to. I promised, too.”

“But you know?”

“As a matter of fact, I do.”

“… That’s disgusting.”

“I am what I am, Yamame – and he is what he is. Since we are reasoning beings, however, we can talk and act civilly. I can’t tell you what I promised not to tell, because he would know, and I gave my word. I don’t want to stir more enmity than the inevitable.”

“But _you know,_ ” Yamame accused. “That’s not fair. He’s not yours.”

“And are you so selfish, Yamame Kurodani?” Satori mocked. “You, Oni-raised, the humblest soul in the Underworld? The beloved grand architect? Are you so self-seeking you would have me break a promise I gave – in my own house? And to your precious lover as well? Come, now. You are better than this – aren’t you?”

Yamame glared up at the smirking Satori with smouldering, one-eyed hate.

Satori Komeiji, hated since centuries, did not even seem to notice.

( ) A hint. A hint would do.  
( ) Everything. Now.

* * *

(X) A hint. A hint would do.

But hate had never comprised a larger part of the yearly malady than that transposed. Yamame Kurodani, whimpering, allowed hers to die out.

“… I won’t,” she mumbled. “I won’t have you break a promise.”

“And why not?” Satori, slyly, asked. “You do wish to know, no?”

The spinstress hid her face. “… It wouldn’t be fair,” she gave up.

A pause as strained as a web on the wind stretched between the spider and mind-reader.

Then, it broke; and through blew a gale of laughter. The laughter was Satori Komeiji’s. And though on Yamame sprung up with a warping mouth, there was no malice in the tiny vicereine’s laughing. Only a hint of something directed inwards, under layer and layer of unabashed relish.

“You are a bundle of delight, did you know that?” asked Satori, wiping at her eyes. “How-ever did you survive down here with the rest of us snakes?”

Yamame flushed. “Um…”

Satori fanned her worries away. “You needn’t speak. I wasn’t criticising you. As a matter of fact, the only one remiss here am I.”

And then, as casually as she might one of her pets, Satori Komeiji reached out, and stroked the earth spider’s blond head.

And as it had (not) with the ghost-like man before, now – too – the most basic of the spider’s instincts offered no reply. Her other senses did; and Yamame’s head did tilt on its own as the small governess petted on the one side of it, but no alarm rose of the stripe which had ever plagued her contacts with her partner. Not one warning. Not a startled tug. There was nothing offensive about the mind-reader’s touch – where her beloved human’s had once sent her into shivers. It was a discomfiting thought – not least in front of one who heard it as well as she.

Satori Komeiji slid her tiny digits through Yamame’s golden locks, chuckling. “Maybe because you don’t really care how I perceive you? Has that ever crossed your pretty head? Whereas he…”

The vicereine left it hanging. Yamame dropped her gaze in chagrin.

“Is that so shameful?” Satori repeated her earlier question. “Of course you don’t care. What am I to you? All I can and will do is touch your hair and wonder what you do to it to keep it so smooth.” She paused, rolling a lock between her fingertips. “… What _do_ you? Mine looks worse even right after washing.”

“… Nothing,” murmured Yamame. “Not really.”

“Then it’s _naturally_ like this?”

The spinstress gave a weak smile. “… Yes.”

“… Talk about disgusting.” Satori’s voice had an overtone of scissors. “Never mind. Let’s retrace a few steps. No, of course it wouldn’t be fair if I handed you your lover’s thoughts on a silver tray. It would be unfair _to me_ , first of all, whose only talent lies in… _extricating_ secrets. I will keep this advantage to myself.”

“What about a hint?” Yamame asked. “A teeny, little hint wouldn’t be unfair – would it?”

Old Hell’s small authority batted her eyelashes in faint astonishment. Then, a cunning expression draped over her pale features. “… Why, I believe you’re right,” she said in mock surprise. “As a matter of fact, a hint would be very much appropriate. We are sisters by circumstance, after all.”

“Sisters?”

“Well—” Lady Satori lifted her shoulders, “—co-prisoners, more like. Co-conspirators, potentially. What I mean is, you are facing a similar entanglement I was but a few years ago; it isn’t beyond the realms of reason that you would choose to pursue my advice… _notwithstanding_ of promises I may have made. Am I being fair so far?”

“So far,” confirmed Yamame.

“Very well. Then supposing you sought said advice, and I had to share my experience…” Satori’s fingers quit stroking, and fell to tap musingly on the table. “… All right. We could put it like this. Men, Yamame – human men, especially – are much compartmentalised creatures. They think _in lines_. Not straight ones, necessarily; but any line is drawn along certain pre-set points. It is those points, in fact, that define what the line is. Imagine a drawing, or one of your projects – except copied from only a map of points where the lines intersected originally. It could still be reproduced to some approximate, no?”

The great architect righted up attentively. “More or less,” she granted. “As long as the copyist understood what it was.”

“Good. Now imagine, if you will, that the snake that I am, I rubbed one of the points out clean. _At least_ one. It could have been more; you can’t tell. What becomes of your drawing, or project, now?”

Yamame Kurodani scowled, picturing a house whose outer wall had, someway, omitted wrapping around one of the corners.

“… It’s a mess,” she said, shying from stronger terms.

Satori narrowed her eyes. “Is it? The walls are all there, no? There’s nothing amiss, is there? The lines are all joining.”

“But they haven’t—”

“They haven’t gone the full way,” agreed the vicereine. “They haven’t touched all the points. It is no accomplishment, then, if their destination is reached – is it? The copyist was probably a fraud. The male mind, Yamame, is just the same. It becomes agitated when its lines haven’t passed through all the goalposts – even if the end is reached regardless. And even – dare I say – when those goalposts shouldn’t matter in the first place. I know you’re happy you’ve reached the end of the line at all, my dear spider, but the end is not enough _for him._ This is your hint, then. Touch all the points. Then, it’ll all join up.”

“… I don’t understand,” Yamame confessed.

Satori Komeiji sat back, appearing (for the first instance since their meeting yesterday) dampened by the earth spider’s limited comprehension. As she sensed the guilt curdling Yamame’s thoughts, however, the tiny vicereine passed a weary hand in front of her eyes, and presented a less steep angle:

“Have you ever told him,” she asked, “why _exactly_ it is that you love him?”

“… No,” admitted the spinstress.

“Has _he_ told _you_?”

“… Yes.”

“Then this—” Satori smacked the table, “—this is your hint. Tell him. Think on it long and hard, if you must – but tell him. _Then_ , it’ll all join up.” She let go of a disappointed sigh. “That was less fair than I’d planned, Yamame. Weren’t you reputed to be a genius?”

Yamame felt her ears growing hot again. “Um—”

“Never mind. As a matter of fact, I tripped myself up on verbose explanations when I should have spoken plainly. San says I’ve taken this from her father. Garion is _supposed_ to be a storyteller, however; I’m meant to be a scholar. It’s my fault.” The small governess’s eyes hardened then. “You do realise,” she said in a dagger-like tone, “that this mustn’t leave this room? I’ve a reputation to keep thorny, Yamame. What would those Oni brutes say if they heard I have been dishing out relationship advice?”

“They may joke,” objected the spinstress, “but they wouldn’t—”

“No,” Lady Satori cut her off. “No, little spider. The only reason I am giving you this hint is because you and I have both had to contend with the same hellish twists of trying to understand how human men work. I’ve enough trouble prevailing on San we aren’t _meant_ to be selfless problem-solvers. At least my husband has received something from his malefactor that makes those in the Underworld less like to become overly fond of him. But I, Yamame? I must remain _what_ I am. The Underworld needs me to be the dread mind-reader, and I accepted that when I took the station. _Who_ I am is only for select few.”

Satori Komeiji, the dread mind-reader, made a wan smile.

“So, please,” she begged, “don’t noise this about.”

Yamame’s mouth slacked open stupidly. She dragged it back shut. “… Um, OK.” She nodded. “I won’t. I’ll try not to.”

“Try your hardest,” Lady Satori urged. “Tell you what. I’ll buy your silence. I’ll ask Garion to find a bottle of something nice to… ease what’s no doubt coming to you no later than tonight. I’ll even say this: take a few towels from the bathroom, and a bowl of clean water to keep nearby. I say this from a personal mistake; those come in handy.”

“… I will,” said the spinstress.

“And _not a peep._ ” The tiny vicereine slashed a finger grimly across her neck. “Are we clear, _little spider_?”

Yamame numbed. “… Crystal.”

Satori Komeiji’s three penetrating eyes judged her sincerity. “Good. Good…”

… And then, their quiet verdict cast (demonstrably, in Yamame’s favour), the small governess deflated, sighed once more, and sank powerlessly back into her chair.

As the yearly malady looked on, puzzled no small amount herself, Satori Komeiji fingered the sudden weariness out of her eyelids. It was not until they had finished, however, and drew away to unveil a down-cast, melancholy gaze, that Yamame Kurodani saw someone else on the tiny vicereine’s seat. Not the ruler of the Underworld, tightly strapping her domain with an overhanging threat – nor a counsel, to whom the earth spider had turned in a dire hour for ordained aid.

Satori Komeiji, Yamame presently realised, was, beneath all, _a woman._ A caretaker to her pets, a mother to her daughter, and a wife to her husband; she was _a person_ – with personal quirks, loyalties and preferences – and glad of another _youkai_ taking the same confusing steps she had in her ascent from _what_ -hood. It had been, more often than not, near impossible to see one who spat on the natural privacy of other minds as anything other than evil. Now, Yamame dimly saw, that evil had been jarred out far enough to show an edge of another side. Not a friendly one; for Satori Komeiji wished no friendship from the underfolk. But _agreeable_ – and that was the term which Yamame’s heart finally enclosed.

Lady Satori, as Lady Satori did, had been listening.

“It is satisfying,” she said with dry self-deprecation, “to be reviewed positively by such an esteemed referee of character as our beloved Yamame. Oh my indeed. As a matter of fact, that has to be the single kindest word I have been called since decades – counting out my Garion’s pretty lies. _Agreeable!_ What-ever else?”

 _… Maybe not so agreeable,_ Yamame thought sullenly.

Satori Komeiji, snickering, once more reached out and mussed the spider’s hair.

“You and I may be similar, Yamame,” she told the pouting spinstress, “but don’t construe it as us being compatible. We aren’t. We have never been. So, don’t sully your cheerful reputation by associating with me too closely. Stay where you are – as beloved Yamame. I will stay where I am – for the good of the Underworld.”

“… Isn’t it lonely where you are?” asked Yamame.

“I have my pets,” reminded Satori. “I have my husband, and I have my daughter. I have my sister – when she comes home. I don’t need an earth spider as well.”

“… I wasn’t offering myself.”

“No. As a matter of fact, no. You weren’t. And very well, because you are someone else’s anyway. But did you know what you _could_ offer?”

“What?”

“A conclusion.” The tiny vicereine pulled away. “Last time we spoke, you were telling me something about a door you had almost ripped down the middle. I’d love to hear what became of that door. I may not be very agreeable, but I’ve seldom disagreed with doors. Well, then?”

And so, the tale of Byakuren Hijiri’s door continued.

* * *


	32. Close as it gets

The rest of that day darted by sooner than any right it had. Inertia did that to a day; and Yamame Kurodani spread no webs to obstruct it.

Once the finish of her most late project had been compliantly recalled (and the drink-lined night before, and the morning full of mistakes after), the great architect had readied to progress into an even less impersonal part of the story. Then, however, as progress is usually, hers as well was restrained by the noise of an approaching argument.

A vexed moment, and she recognised these arguing voices; and before long the door to Satori Komeiji’s most private room was – with never a knock – brazenly opened.

“—and meticulosity,” the ghost-like Garion was explaining over his shoulder, “is ever a part of that. As, yea, indeed, of any craft.”

Paran, following in, replied patiently, “But the goal of all craft is purpose.” The patience was so deep it might very good be mined. “These? These have none – none practical, anyway. There is no need—”

Yamame’s beloved human, as though only now noting the switch in his surrounds, abruptly stood as still as a pillar of salt. His brows took on a rather more sour (than salty) bend when his gaze fell first on the grand, canopied bed, and then on its tiny owner – still seated at her quaint wickerwork table. Satori Komeiji, smirking, raised a hand and wiggled her little fingers. The spell was unknown to Yamame, but it must have worked. Paran’s brows compressed even tighter.

Heedless of his wife’s tampering, the blond storyteller countered, “ _Navigation,_ neighbour. Navigation is practical. Not to you or I, perchance; but think you of a future, yet clandestine, wherein these maps might come to bear. What use then, pray tell, would an inexact map be?”

“To whom?” questioned Yamame’s human, the contention at hand exceeding the anyway small mind-reader. “Those who live here know these paths already. Those who don’t – those have no business knowing. Your maps are at best useless. At worst, they are dangerous.”

The blond man’s eyes went wintery. “Then we’ve a difference in views.”

Paran, shoulders squaring, crossed his arms. It was a slow process, because Paran had fought enough views to learn they could be skittish things, apt to duck out of the way and leap down the jaws of defeat. More importantly, the process was _familiar;_ for Yamame’s (even so) beloved human had done it once before, to another of the Underworld’s denizens. It puffed her cheeks up with piqued memories.

She vented them into an accusing growl. “You’re doing it again!”

Her human – and Satori’s as well – gave her a dull glance. Then, they gave the same to each other. And then, to her again.

“… What?” Paran spoke their thoughts.

Yamame squeezed the armrests of her noisy chair. “What!” she huffed. “Spreading hostilities, that’s what! Again! What were you going to do – bite him? Here, in front of us, too?”

“… Were you?” Paran asked the other man reprovingly.

Garion shook his head. “Methinks the miss means you.”

“Well, I wasn’t. Nor have I – ever. That more or less settles it.”

“I do not know that,” disagreed Satori’s husband. “I only ever bit one, and she is—”

Lady Satori clapped her hands explosively. “All right. That is far enough. Garion, _love_ —” she gave the blond man a stare that might smoke a hole through a thatch roof, “—what and whom you use your teeth on is nobody’s concern but yours and that person’s. As a matter of fact, she should very much like to discuss that with you, at length – _out_ of shot of bystander ears. Good? Good. Yamame,” she addressed the (also fiery) earth spider next. “Yes, well, snuff that out. You’ll be pleased to hear these two oafs weren’t… _spreading hostilities,_ if you’ll lend the term. I know. It might have looked that way, but it was quite something else.”

It was Yamame’s turn to speak her mind. “… What?”

“ _I thought we were,_ ” Garion noted sidelong.

“Shush, you!” hissed Satori. “As I was saying, it is all rather simple. Silly, yes. Most simple things tread that edge. What these two were doing, Yamame, was _making order_. Among themselves, by themselves, and I think quite despite our own selves.”

“I don’t—” began Yamame.

“I feel nobody does but me,” murmured Satori. “See, my dear spider, what these idiots got into their swollen heads—” she slashed said heads with a sword-like glance, “—is that, since one of them looks older – but not enough, and the other looks bigger – but not enough, that their customary means of setting the pecking order have sorely failed them. So, to amend that void in their delicate worldview, they went and invented themselves a problem. What was it, again?” The demand had been aimed at the vicereine’s husband. No answer came forth; but, of course, none had to. “Ah yes,” Satori chirped. “A philosophical question! About maps and use thereof. Amazing. And then, I suppose me, whoever had won that tilt of wits would have come out atop, while the loser would tuck their tail under and have to wash the winner’s dishes. No? Am I not just the rightest in the world?”

The men peered at each other – rather more boyish than manly. Satori Komeiji chopped their prides even shorter.

“And why those big frowns?” she mocked them. “Hmm? Why, and here I thought you’d brought this riddle here so I could solve it for you. As a matter of fact, I shall solve it anyway. Garion here, the one with a haystack for a head, is your winner. I own this house, and, by some miraculous turn, I happen to love him very much. Older-looking, clever-mouthed and all. So, there you have it. Congratulations. You’re still both doing the dishes.”

The blond man managed to look conciliatory as he turned to his philosophic rival.

“Is this what we had in mind?” he wondered.

“… I suppose we might have,” gave Paran.

“Shake, then?” Garion asked, one hand offered.

Paran sighed. Then, surrendering, he shook. “… I stand by what I said about those maps, though.”

Garion beamed. “Well now,” he said speculatively. “Well now.”

At the table, Satori Komeiji became a picture of exasperation. “See?” she complained to Yamame, “See what I meant by lines? I’ll tell you _all_ what. Why do we not go to the library and take a good, long look at those deuced maps? As a mapper— bother, as a _matter_ of fact, it’s been a while since I did myself. Well?”

Though the proposition was well-received by everyone but the giver; still go they did, quitting Lady Satori’s warm chambers in loose pairs.

All the same, they hadn’t two steps (or it might have been three, or just one) past the library’s braced, double-winged door, when the men sped ahead for their maps wholly unconcerned of the trailing women. All but, and Yamame would have stormed after; only then, Satori Komeiji seized her by the wrist, shaking her lavender curls and (unsuccessfully) suppressing a fond smile. Instead, the small governess of Old Hell led the eldest earth spider deeper among the unlit shelves. As they went farther from the entrance, the air grew stuffier; soon, and Yamame saw dust resting in a grey film over lower-stored tomes.

“You’ll have to excuse me,” said Satori, picking out the thought. “I haven’t as much as read a book board-to-board since San was born. Same with keeping this place neat. Sometimes…”

“Yes?” asked Yamame.

“… Sometimes,” Satori gave up, “Sometimes I wonder how it was ever all I could do, to sit here and read.”

“Wasn’t that lonely?”

“I don’t miss it, if that’s what you’re casting for. Not _too badly,_ anyway. There should be a section on architecture hereabouts; lend me those spider eyes, and we’ll find something to tide you over until those two are done. I’ll gladly do some catching-up myself.”

It was another clock-less sweep of time after that the men, taking their fill of food of knowledge, announced another kind of food was promptly required. A wiser (or were they?) two of human men thusly fled the confines of Satori Komeiji’s library to toil in one of her mansion’s dozen kitchens. A touch later still, Yamame followed Lady Satori out as well.

Their dinner was unconventional; even so, the spinstress registered a few accents so domestic, instantly her love welled up again for her human. Satori Komeiji’s own blond lover, pleading an unspecific lapse of memory, rushed out the dining hall ahead any other one of them was close to finish. No sooner had that been reached than Paran picked their dishes and cutlery up, and likewise hurried out. The eldest of the Underworld’s spiders nursed no doubt who would wash them would become the next point of philosophical debate in the nearest kitchen very soon.

As for her elder self, poked with stares by her hostess, Yamame Kurodani stood to retrace her yesterday’s steps even as far as the mansion’s marble-tiled bathroom. Then, an armful of towels and a wash basin dutifully riding pillion, the earth spider negotiated the trail yet again, now to her and her human’s assigned guest-room.

A slim, ceramic bottle of sloshing content waiting atop the desk was the first to hook her attention – after, anyway, she had set her tottering baggage down. Accompanying, just beside, a twin pair of wine-glasses was standing: long of leg and so fine as to be gauzy. Against her best stress calculations, Yamame pinched one between her strong _youkai_ ’s fingers, and filled it half-full of the mysterious drink.

The drink was as scarlet as oxidised blood and bottomed with a dump of whitish residue. When, however, it was rolled around in the glass, it clouded up at once into a cute, pinkish suspension. Yamame tried a sip. The taste was, over all, very sweet (sweeter, even, than the apple-barley wine from two nights before); a coarse after was left, however, occupying the earth spider’s tongue. She topped the testing batch off, and poured herself a proper one. Then, she sat cross-legged in her borrowed beddings.

And then, swirling her drink, Yamame Kurodani, the yearly malady, began to think – long and hard – on what might very good be one of the more embarrassing investigations in her life.

* * *

She hadn’t half of it stitched out when he slipped into the room.

Her human, he calling himself Paran, pushed the door shut and turned about to face her. His mouth was holding onto a checked half-smile when he did; it broadened first (when he saw Yamame on the bed) then spoiled (when he saw her drinking). His head shook its disapproval.

Yamame’s replying smile was a little shy. Still, when she indicated the bottle on the desk, unerringly the remaining glass was filled and raised to inspection.

“Had fun?” she decided to ask once Paran took the chair.

Her human was eyeing the dichotomous drink from below. “… Mm.”

“‘Mm?’” teased Yamame. “That bad?”

“Oh no, I had fun,” said Paran, in a tone implying anything from sincerity to a severe allergy to fun. “Only, I’d forgotten what it was like, talking with normal people. Well—” he made an ugly sound, “—normal _-ish._ ”

 _That makes you not-normal,_ a voice in Yamame’s head needlessly translated. She gave her best surmise. “Because he’s Lady Satori’s husband?”

Her best, apparently, wasn’t very good.

“Not even.” Her human – how to proceed with the parti-coloured mixture finally dawning – twirled his glass around. His eyes narrowed with suspicion when everything seemed to work out along his guesswork, precluding volcanism. “… He talks up a flood, for one,” he went on, still a-frown. “We’re about of age, but it’s like we’re from neighbouring centuries, for another. He actually went all thee-thou on me once, if you’ll believe. And, I think, his world is some five times wider than mine.”

“How do you mean?”

“The way he _talks_ about it. Not that it’s _in-_ accurate; but, hearing him say it, you’d figure it should take days to get here from our town – and another week to the top of the Goddesses’ Mount. Imaginative terms, I guess.”

“Lady Satori said he was a storyteller,” Yamame remembered. “Maybe that’s it?”

“Ah, yes.” Paran shot enough sarcasm into his reply to bed-ride an Oni for a fortnight. “That _could_ distract the roads awfully.”

The spinstress giggled. “But you _had_ fun, no?”

“A bit,” he admitted. He thrust his glass out toward the bed. “Cheers?”

Yamame, inching up on all-fours (or anyway all-threes), clinked her drink to his. Gently. “Cheers.”

As he retracted his arm and tried of the sugary mixture (mouth warping in surprise), Yamame Kurodani took a close, careful stock of her partner.

Paran of the Human Village (not-so-called), envoy of earth spiders, the solitary priest of his namesake god, was a median instance of his inscrutable species. As humans did, he, too, had four limbs in sum: two on top and two lower. As those of human _males_ went, his as well were long and robust. His shoulders seemed almost oversized compared to her own; atop those, a stubborn head was carried, housing some of his more appreciable features. He had lengthening hair of a certain shade. His two eyes were narrowed, by themselves slightly angular, and…

Yamame Kurodani’s brows hugged as she registered – for a confused first time – _what colour_ her human’s eyes were.

It made no sense. It could make none. The spider’s mind vended in detail-work. That she had never recognised it ahead of now belied her fundamental self.

At the same time, it did not. After all, her human’s details _had never been_ important – until they were – but, by then, he had already been an accustomed part of her home. At first, he had been but yet another man; by the time he had turned _more_ , he had become fully an everyday sight. He had _already been_ her human – only then not yet so close. Why should she have dwelt on his details? What use would it make? She saw what, now – but that did not erase her mistake.

A full half of her not-half-done inquest into her own feelings seemed now very foolish. She still had the other eighth, though.

“Paran?” She attired an apologetic smile. “We need to talk about something.”

The human Paran, as he had whenever put nearby these words, ranged through a variety of complex expressions. At length he settled on one less straining on his facial muscles – rather a mild discomfort than his foot getting chopped off for a drunken bet. At last, he sighed.

“… When have we not?”

Several heartbeats were done before Yamame understood the quip. “… Right,” she indulged. “So, can we?”

“Talking is the least we will do, I feel.” Paran gave her an unamused stare. “On one condition, Yamame.”

“What kind?”

“Until we’re done,” he issued, “you will stay there. I will stay here. No touching.”

The spinstress puffed up her cheeks.

“Why?” she blew out.

“Because,” said Paran, with a cough of a personal illness, “Because, very clearly, I can’t think in a straight line when you’re near.”

Yamame Kurodani, startling, searched her human’s face for tells he had, somehow, overheard her conversation with Lady Satori. She found nothing except innocence. It was slightly foxed (humaned?), a touch sarcastic – but it was still a kind of innocence.

“… All right,” she surrendered. “No touching, then. Very good.”

 _… Snake,_ she added inside.

Paran accepted their newest compact with a nod. “Very good. So? What did you want to talk about?”

“Your problem.”

“I have problems, Yamame – _plural._ ” He fairly scoffed the word. “Which one did you want?”

Yamame, that much cannier, denied him the rise. “You know which one,” she told him. “The one you have with me.”

“I don’t have a problem _with you,_ Yamame.”

“This morning told me something else.”

The human Paran actually wrenched on his chair. His drink poised to spill. “… I don’t have a problem with you,” he repeated.

“With whom, then?” challenged the spider. “Was there someone else? A small animal inside your robe after all? It didn’t feel like one, you know.”

Someway, by an effort of a _youkai_ ’s will, she held her ears from melting off. The yearly malady kept her face as white and regal as Satori Komeiji’s had been when scolding her husband. Paran, no greater will available to him but his own, winced without pretence.

“… My problem,” he rasped finally, “is with me, Yamame. Not you.”

 _Hoarder._ “Are we going to give it a name any time soon?”

“I’m not positive what it’d be.”

“Why don’t you describe it? We’ll figure it out together.”

Threading out his lately hobby, the human Paran, rumbling, stared philosophically into his glass. In the end, he quit applying the motions of particles inside the drink to his own circumstance, and set it down on the desk.

“… How long,” he asked, quietly, “How long do you think I have been in love with you?”

The yearly malady, Yamame Kurodani, said nothing. As well since she knew no answer she had owed anything to her human’s inner mind, as she knew she did not know.

Paran, displaying he knew she knew, continued. “What I would say,” he said, “is that I have loved you since before we even met.”

The spinstress smiled. “That is silly.”

“Might be.” Her human shaped a shrug – with his mouth. It was all Yamame could do not to comment on it. “Might not,” Paran went on. “Might be the feelings I had been jarring had to go somewhere when I found out you weren’t – after all – responsible for what… happened, to my father. Might be they went entirely the wrong way. What I do know is that, since then, I had dreamt of meeting you. Making amends. And, I won’t lie… maybe more.”

“And then you actually met me,” Yamame guessed.

“Yes,” agreed Paran. “And you were not at all whom I had imagined.”

“Who did you imagine?”

“A beautiful, young woman,” he teased, “with lustrous, black hair, wide eyes, and a smile that could goad the nails out of a wall. It makes no matter, Yamame,” he grunted; “I had not known you, and so pictured something else. What I still reckoned, you and I could still get along; I thought, if I treated you good, that I could still make you a friend.” _And maybe more_ went unsaid. “So I tried. I kept trying. And then…” He sighed. “… Then, you bit me.”

Yamame pinned the regret suddenly welling up in her chest. “… I did,” she admitted, for what good that did. “I did that, didn’t I?”

Her human bobbed his head. “And that was the first time – I thought – that I had misjudged you.”

He reached behind for his drink again, and drained half of it in a swig that bulged his throat when he swallowed it down. His long, rough fingers occupied with the delicate stem of the glass as he forged out his next words.

“… I had time, though,” the words turned out – and Yamame detected a trace of the false, priestly Paran, who dealt with their warrantees and their oft-exuberant demands; “I had time,” Paran said, “as I lay in bed, aching and hawking up my insides, to get used to that thought. I had time to internalise that you _were_ a _youkai_ after all. An earth spider. Something not meant for… for what I had meant for you. Still, I had those years I had unjustly hated you to make up for, so, well… I resolved to keep working. To keep you at a safe arm’s length from then on as well – but, mostly, I decided seeing you fulfilled was enough. That this was everything that mattered. Almost… and I would even have believed it.”

“Then I began to experiment,” Yamame recalled.

“Then you began to experiment,” agreed her human. “And that… that was the second time I realised I had misjudged you.”

Again, he raised the half-full glass to his mouth. The remaining drink, emptying unceremoniously, rolled down his gullet with an almost audible rasp of guilt sliding down along. Paran eyed the trail of white residue in the glass as though it had had said guilt concealed inside all along. It had not, however; and Yamame’s human soon wrenched the allegation back around – on himself.

“… The bald truth is,” he confessed, “that I can’t decide how you feel about me.”

Yamame frowned. Not least because the phrasing was weird – but mostly because the question itself was as well. “I’ve told you,” she pointed out. “Haven’t I?”

“Yes,” grunted Paran. “Yes. You have. And I _don’t believe you._ ”

“… Why?”

Somehow, the question had surfaced in a marked absence of a much less delicate escort. Someway, Yamame Kurodani, the yearly malady, kept her emotions wrapped and short of exploding out of said wrap in a spray of searing shrapnel. Somewise, the mother of plagues did not leap up and bite him. Instead… and it was an “instead” thicker than any she had swallowed in her life… she held onto her own glass and kept her fangs sheathed tightly behind her lips.

Paran – the good, reliable, steady Paran, whom she loved whatever his beliefs – felt them all the same.

“… Wrong words,” he granted, smiling a bitter, self-loathing smile – one Yamame knew all too well. “And this… This, here, is the problem. I don’t understand you. I thought I had – twice. Twice, I was mistaken. I want to believe I understand now – that our definitions match. I just don’t know that I can.”

All which the spinstress could say – and say it safely – was the same question once more. “… Why?”

“Because,” said Paran, “Because, Yamame, I’ve never done anything for you to feel this way.”

Now, Yamame did leap up. Though not entirely witting; but she did not leap _at him_ – nor spill her drink – and that was to the good. “But you have!” she yelled. “You have, you idiot! You’ve _spoken_ for me! You’ve made it so I could pursue my greatest, my oldest passion – to lengths I’d never pursued it before. You’ve shown me that there was still something for me to learn. This is nothing to you?”

“I didn’t do that to earn your favour, Yamame.”

“Then why?” she demanded.

“Because I had _wronged you,_ ” Paran insisted. “At least at first. A ways in, and I found watching you work was reward enough; but, I had never meant that to endear you to me, Yamame. I have said this already. You are honest, hard-working and neighbourly. You are the best draughtswoman in _Gensokyo,_ and yet you do not flaunt. You’re _irresistibly_ pretty. And I?” Paran spread his arms cynically. “I am only a skilled liar. I can’t even keep an oath I made to myself. I can’t measure up to you. I can’t even understand how you feel. I’m not good enough for you.”

His eyes – those lovable eyes, of a certain colour which could have been anything else and would still be lovable – steeled as though he had struck the deepest seat of his dilemma – and set into a determined stare.

“I’m not _good enough_ for you,” he said again, the criticism – short as to be trite – somehow encapsulating a problem so enormous, it had filled an entire month of evenings which could otherwise have been spent, if not voicing their feelings, then at least exploring them in a less web- and promise-wrecking atmosphere.

Yamame Kurodani, the humble, the best draughtswoman in _Gensokyo_ , started back at him who would reject her on the simplest grounds that she was too pretty to resist. The eldest of earth spiders, she who had seen the Underworld laid out and built an aeon ago, narrowed her ageless eyes at the human who had, with little apparent effort, shown her she had still another aeon of study ahead.

But was he? Was he, who called himself Paran and lied about it, good enough for her?

( ) He was.  
( ) He wasn’t, but…

* * *

(X) He was.

The answer lined a less pretty truth.

“… You’re wrong,” murmured Yamame.

Her human _poised._ For a heartbeat or two, a thousand repeals seemed to flit behind his eyes. He fought hard to snatch just one.

The yearly malady, Yamame Kurodani, snatched it first.

“… Not about you,” she finished. “About _me._ ”

It was, altogether, nothing shy of blunt.

It was clumsy. Non-sticky. Coarse around the edges. Un-spiderlike. But, it had turned Paran’s head – and that was everything she needed. A wedge of doubt. A sliver of his self-destructive, human curiosity. The human Paran – her human, her Paran – gawked at her, as though she was his one true love and was about to say something stupid. Which, she hoped she was. Which, she hoped she wasn’t.

“… You’re wrong,” she said again. “You’re wrong… because I am not as good as you think.”

His jaw unlatched, little doubtful to loose a harsh objection. Yamame unravelled it with a stare.

Only when their eyes met again did the yearly malady recognise something else. A _gap._ A distance. A _difference_ – of age, of life, of experience and personal history. Where Yamame’s had whetted her skill – as well as the wont to laugh – his had been human and hard. There was a kind of wistful sarcasm edging the depth of his gaze: a shield, eternally raised, against every minute in consequence. Where Yamame-of-Black-Valley befriended everyone (for who would wish her an enemy?), Paran of the Human Village founded his relations in a swamp of wariness – and build up. They were nothing akin after all, human and _youkai_ ; even Lady Satori’s partner, misted as his precise nature was, was inert in the realms of power the dread mind-reader treaded every day.

They could _never be_ alike. For the distances were too great, the chasms too wide, for even the spider-limbed to touch the other side.

Almost comically, none of that had made matter to Paran. He, human-legged, had cleared these gaps with never a care. He had leapt them, landing firm of foot on Yamame’s side, so soon as circumstance presented. Never mind the mother of plagues and her ill-laced fangs; never mind the menaces stalking passages of the Underworld. They were nothing more than potholes beside the trench of doubt Yamame’s human had shovelled out between them.

It was deep. It was wide. It was stamped, benched, and braced all across with stout planks hewed out of mistrust and suspicion. It was impassable.

It was also, Yamame knew, dug entirely in watery ground.

The solution, in fact, was as simple as threading a needle. It was simplicity in its simplest form. What the spinstress had to do – what she had _ever had_ to do – was to dig her own trench. Adjacent to his, bending precariously. All she had to do was stifle her sensibilities for a moment, and make them lap over…

… And watch, as the swampy soil caved in on them both.

The great architect, Yamame Kurodani, gripped her mental shovel in both mental hands.

“… So what?” she asked him, who sat perched on his planks and scowled on. “So what, Paran?” she repeated. “So what if I’m hard-working? It’s stuff I like, things I am good at. Why would I not work hard? So what if I’m honest? Anyone should be, if they lived among the Oni. So what if I’m neighbourly? I _like_ company. I make no apology for that. So what, if I _am_ the best at what I do? I didn’t learn it to impress anyone. There are few enough architects in _Gensokyo_ anyway; one of us is just slightly better than the rest. So, I want to know, what?”

Her human stiffened, a reply squeezing its way painfully up from his chest. “… You are—”

“I am Yamame Kurodani,” Yamame Kurodani rode it dead. “I am the grand architect of the New Capital. I built the first lighthouse, and oversaw the rest. I am the one humans have styled _the mother of plagues._ I am she who they later boiled down to _a yearly malady._ I am – to our minds, anyway – the eldest of the Underworld’s earth spiders. But, I ask again, _what’s so dearly important_ about it?”

Paran had no answer.

“I, Paran,” confessed Yamame, “ _don’t know_ what. I _don’t know_ what these titles count for, really. I don’t know why it should be important that I work hard. So what if I do? It’s what I am, nothing more. So what if I’m honest? The Oni approbate it, but what about others? What about humans? So what if I’m neighbourly? I hadn’t even thought to ask the name of the one human who had lived with me for months, until I had happened on it by accident. I had bit him, too – which neither of us can seem to escape. And,” she lowered her voice, eye contact cracking, “And, so what if I’m _pretty?_ I never asked to be. I am a female, so I take care of myself. So what? It can’t even make that one human forget about the biting.”

Clumsy. Non-sticky. Coarse. But nobody had said truth had ever to be elsewise.

The grand architect, the shining blond star of the Underworld, Yamame Kurodani, looked up once more at her beloved, lying human. He, who could under no Fate ever be good enough for the perfect Yamame he had imagined, was staring guiltily back.

Yamame, the one before him, smiled a dim smile at his momentary confusion…

… And kicked hard at the wall still separating their trenches.

“You are good enough,” said this Yamame, water funnelling past and devastating months of careful digging in heartbeats. “I _want you_ , liar and all. Not whoever; not anyone else. I want you. You’re good enough. You are, because – did you know? We’re both pretty idiots. We really are… but you, at least, thought to _give me a chance._ ”

There was, at first, no response.

At second, one of a sort did sew together; and Paran crashed his hanging jaw shut with a stupidly loud _clack!_ Yamame stood (sat) defiant, humour washing past her, broiling with the remains of their destroyed trenches.

At third, Paran climbed to his feet.

Wading, as though the bog was real and not all in the spider’s head, her human closed in on the bed. A moment still, and he jerked around; another – and he pitched beside her like a soft, stupid, lying, beloved brick of a man. The spinstress held very fast when his arms went around her front and back. Then, even faster – when his nose parted the hair at her ear, and he breathed out.

 _“… Don’t stoop to my level, Yamame,”_ he said.

The earth spider let her eyes squeeze closed. _“Then don’t make me,”_ she whispered back.

Stunned by the command in her voice, the human Paran raked his head for a proper denial. Yamame, using of his distraction, hooked her fingers around his wrists, pressing his hands flush to her body. The denial withered, died.

Against every spider’s fibre inside her urging her to let him tangle up by himself, the spinstress, Yamame Kurodani, twisted her head around until her face was – in the absence of a more proper term – directly facing his. Never relying on her keen hunter’s eyes, going solely by the memory of his personal architecture – Yamame pushed her lips to his in a rather less than selfless kiss. Not a good-morning one. Not the good-evening. The more recent, “I like you” brand stitched closer to the current; the latest one, from the previous day, was a teasing possibility – but not there yet.

This was a new, “I caught you” kiss. Yamame marvelled at its potential.

The human caught inside it had no resistance to offer, even when she began to climb onto his lap. The spider kept her trap locked as long as it took to secure her now-accustomed place. Then, and not earlier – only once she was on top of him and his arms were wound around her back – did the huntress at last release its threads.

It desperately made her want to trap him again.

So she did.

A handful of ticks of the absent clock, and she pulled back – slightly.

_“… Paran?”_

_“… Yamame?”_

The reply had shaped atop her lips, each M a separate, fleeting contact.

 _“Accept me,”_ she pleaded.

Paran’s answer was stiff. _“… I accept you.”_

_“But?”_

And a sigh. _“… But I don’t accept myself.”_

 _“What if I do?”_ The earth spider stressed her question by tying her arms behind her human’s neck. _“What if I do accept you, Paran? Would that help?”_

A longer pause – two breaths, three, more – preceded a halting reply.

 _“… It helps,”_ grunted Paran, _“It helps – when you do this. Gods, what am I even…”_

Yamame felt her mouth spread wide in a happy smile. _“Would it help more if I did something else?”_

_“Like?”_

_Like this,_ Yamame managed to think – but never to give it voice before… well, before she did it.

Might be, the ugly truth was, none of this would help. Might be, Paran’s personal illness – propriety, or whatever the name she gave it – could never be anything more than de-symptomized. Might be, all her elaborate trench ploy had done was splatter them in mud and very improper emotions.

What the mother of plagues did know was that, by the end of the following minutes, the illness was, at least, temporarily suppressed.

Her human, by now as red and breathless as an Oni after a lap round the Capital, swallowed. Yamame licked her sticky lips as she recognised exactly what it was he had swallowed. She felt her own throat clench in sympathetic response.

“… What happens now?”

She had almost wheezed the question, choked up by her own neediness. Paran swallowed again, looked at her…

… And then he told her – clinically and, she thought, not a little ruthlessly.

“… But first, Yamame,” he added, “I want to see you… _out of that bra._ ”

The spinstress giggled – kissed him – and resumed giggling.

“That really annoyed you, didn’t it?” she teased.

Paran pulled a tragic face.

“Yes,” he said. “It really, _really_ did.”

* * *


	33. Chapter 33

Later, as they lay close together in the orange darkness, Yamame purred.

It was a continuous process, because, across the lately minutes, a familiar hand had been softly scraping its fingernails up and down the naked length of her back. The spinstress bathed in the sensation, allowing it to soak her thoughts in warm delight. In return, she ignored the repeated tickling of the hairs on her head. The idea of being _sniffed_ so shamelessly left her feeling a shade ridiculous – flattered as well, and faintly excited – but mostly ridiculous. But, if her human wanted to sniff her, then Yamame’s head was laid on offer.

At any rate, sniffing was small beside the other things he had done to her in the previous hour.

Most of those things, Yamame Kurodani discovered afterwards, would stitch as nothing but a blur of imagery and a rush of emotions in in the fabric of her memory. All very pleasant images and emotions; but her spider’s need for particulars would have to sate with only a handful of sharper instances. All else was trust, love and intimacy stacked together and pressed into an ecstatic mush.

As they lay close together – skin-nude, tired and disinclined to clean up beyond the towels Lady Satori had advised be kept nearby – Yamame Kurodani, purring, span one of those more defined moments over in her mind.

After they had named the first problem to be removed, Yamame had shed out of the borrowed day-dress and reclaimed her seat on Paran’s lap. Acutely aware of his staring, and somewhat less than confident, she had stuck with her fingers feeling out the tiny wire hooks of her bra.

“… Um, Paran?” she had murmured.

“Mm?”

The mother of plagues had run her tongue over her teeth. “My… These,” she had pushed out at last. “They, um… They _droop_ a little – when they aren’t in a bra. Are you… Are you OK with that?”

Paran’s eyes had gone a little wild – before starching into a grim determination.

“… I want to see that,” he had rasped.

Yamame Kurodani, nodding, had tugged the hooks loose – and the contents of the bra spilled free. Paran seemed to freeze.

“… Are you OK with this?” Yamame had asked.

Her human had not answered, rather sucking in a forgotten breath. He grabbed, instead, at her half-unclothed hips – and pressed her tighter to himself.

He was _very firmly_ OK with it.

Skinning him out of his clothes had been more difficult; between distractions being applied all over her body, and Paran’s insistence to keep it in constant contact with his own, Yamame’s spinstress’s hands had been needled to their limits. When finally she had got his robe to open all the way down the front, the inside was as deliciously _male_ as it had been in the morning. Yamame remembered testing the texture and pliability of just about everything she could, until her human had caught her arms and pried them tantalisingly away.

She had half a heart to bite him – even if only playfully – when he had spoken.

“… You first,” he had said.

Yamame’s reply had been as senseless as his declaration. “Me first what?”

“I want to… _take care_ of you first.”

“Why?”

“… Because,” Paran had breathed at her, “I wouldn’t last a minute in you right now.”

 _Oh,_ the spinstress had wanted to say. Only, by the time the thought had framed, she had been turned around on his lap, and his hands had been exploring her own elasticity.

She had shaped many other “Oh”s in the following course, had Yamame Kurodani – not least of which in a tight, shuddering, clawing finale, which had left her breathless and so utterly in love with the human gently kissing her all throughout, she mindlessly wished to give him everything and all of herself, forever. The aching need to devote herself to him for the rest of her life had settled and subsided in the minutes she had spent recovering inside his arms – but the mother of plagues would always recall the embarrassing moment when she had briefly craved to _belong_ to someone else.

The next thing she remembered was after Paran had slipped her off of himself, reversing their usual arrangement. Atop her, goading her legs to spread with intently administered touch, her human had been flushed red, hot, and twitching with welled-up need. Yamame had wanted nothing more than to let him release it ~~in~~ with her body.

He had warned her he would not last long… Nor had he. This part of their ritual (what else was it?) had proven shorter and less pleasant than the preceding – even selfish in her human’s focus on his solitary motions. Still, when he had driven her up the bed’s headboard, pushed one last time and collapsed all over her – shivering, throbbing and gasping his feelings into her ear – those forty seconds had instantly climbed among the favourite she had ever spent in his company.

Later, once they had towelled each other down, they would lie again, and enjoy a closeness the presence of clothes had ever denied to them before. And Yamame would purr.

A while later yet, she would stop purring. Not for Paran’s hands had lost their pleasant touch; but Yamame Kurodani was a creature whose standards only swelled with experience. She swelled up herself, ripping out her human’s embrace; up and up, until she was sat astride him, her nakedness (and his) on full display.

Paran gave her a once-over which fairly could not determine where to end. It became a twice-over. Then a thrice.

Yamame, lightly flexing her cooling shoulders, thrilled seeing his mouth involuntarily jar open, then close again. She grinned.

“Anything you like?” she asked.

Her human’s quadruple-overing eyes slid up and halted at her face. Paran seemed to consider making a joke. Then he seemed to consider differently.

“… You,” he told her.

“Where on me do you like?”

His gaze gave its own answer, all the while his mouth tried to fool her. “… Everywhere?”

Yamame jiggled with a laugh. “All very flattering, Paran,” she chuckled, “but I am more than just these.”

Paran quit staring. Then, he stared again. “… Sorry,” he lied. “I didn’t get a good look earlier. They are… _striking,_ when you’re leaning over like this.”

The spinstress leaned over a bit lower. “More striking than my legs?”

“All of you is equally striking, Yamame. You’re perfect.”

Yamame the perfect smacked him – even if kissing him had been her first instinct. “You’re biased,” she opined. “Your sentiments are colouring your appraisal. I know I told you once that both artists and their art desire appraisal, but the least you could do for me at this point is give me an honest reply. These are nothing special. They _droop._ ”

“They’re prettier than any I’ve ever seen, Yamame.”

“How many is that?”

Paran ground out a sigh. “… A couple. Is it important?”

“Whose?”

“Is it important?” he repeated.

“Yes. It is.” The spinstress nudged him. “Whose?”

Her human grunted his dislike for the topic. “There was a girl,” he blustered. “One – years ago, and nothing serious. She was flat, twiggy, and had an attitude. Hers were the only other ones I’ve seen. Satisfied?”

Yamame wasn’t. “Where on her did you like?”

Now Paran squirmed in earnest. “… Is it _really_ so important, Yamame?”

( ) It was.  
( ) It wasn’t.

* * *

(X) It was.

And it was. Within the span of the month, Yamame had seem him, whose past had hitherto been an unknown stain, labour the basics of handling a female awfully… _even if_ the female in the equation had been a spider. The sheer conceptual impossibility of him doing better with one before was so tall it was well above the realms of astronomy.

And yet, if he had…

The spider in the equation smiled, counting on the brightness of it to blind her human to the real source of her insistence.

“It is,” said Yamame. “It is important. We like to know these things.”

Paran’s brows bumped. “… We?”

“Women. Women like to know.”

A sceptical moment squished by before the human realised the returning snub. He rolled his head left and right in the pillow. “… I’ve been trying to be clever around you too much,” he groaned. “It’s spread.”

“That’s what bad things do,” the mother of plagues confirmed. “So, who? I’ve known a few twiggy girls, but none of them your crowd. Someone from your town? I didn’t linger too much on other females when you took me there. The red one at the table – Grumpy? – she had an attitude, but – considering what she was…”

“And she wasn’t flat,” Paran added. Ahead an offence was mounted that he _had_ noticed, he went on, “No, not that one. And, gods watching, she wasn’t in that place that night. Or a _youkai._ My mother would lose her mind.”

Yamame’s brows stretched their turn. “Your mother?”

“… The girl,” grunted Paran. “She was… or is, the daughter of one of the servants. If she was a _youkai_ , that would figure we’ve had one living in the estate for years. And, when you recall how my father turned out…”

He let it hang on a frayed string. Yamame stepped around it. “And that girl,” she returned, “she was your… previous lover?”

Paran wrung out a short, ugly chuckle. “I do wonder.”

“What does that mean?”

The earth spider’s lover (he was, wasn’t he?) cocked his head back and sighed at the beige ceiling.

Against all spidery logic, Yamame felt all at once the most naked she had since she had peeled out of her dress.

The calm, analytical Yamame Kurodani (bored out of her wits from recent inactivity) theorised this was so because, now her human’s eyes were elsewhere, there was simply no further sense in remaining nude. If Paran was _not_ watching her lean over and droop then why was she not wearing clothes – as she had learned in her first steps into sentience? No placeholder excuse reared; but, even as she pulled the bed-sheets up and over her shoulders, she kept the halves indecently apart on the front – just in case her human did look back.

Which he soon did – and didn’t seem to mind. Yamame felt slightly cheated.

“… In short,” Paran told her, as if any of his explanations were ever anything else, “the girl and I walked out for a time. We did… things that lovers do, because we were young. I was brash and naïve. She had a way with her words – and her mouth in general. When I… _found out_ about you, I called it all off. Or, rather, I quit reacting to her pushes. It helped that getting my grudge shattered like that had left me questioning everyone.” His mouthed quirked with ill-disguised loathing. “… Yes. It really did help.”

“How?” asked Yamame. “I mean, with what?”

“It helped, because later, after everything, I heard from a mutual friend she had been planning to cram herself into the estate’s inheritance. After my father had… expired, it was generally thought the business would pass on to me. It did, for a while. Then, of course, my mother came out of her grieving, and neatly shunted me off to lower tasks. Akkarin— That is, the girl – she had her fingers a little deep by then, so she kept playing either way. And then, finally, I heard the truth about you. It re-set my head. That made us all formal again.”

Paran, whom the girl Akkarin had likely called another name, let his confession taper off to a silent point. He exhaled somewhat arduously. Then, he re-locked his attention ahead, where a _youkai_ was still pinning him to the bed.

As though but now marking the decrease in the area of her skin showing, the human stitched his narrowed gaze down the gap Yamame had left in the covers. Almost nonchalantly – certainly improperly – he slid one callused hand around her hip. Then, he slid it up: up her flank, up and higher up… until, disturbed, that half of her improvised cape slipped back from her shoulder. It tumbled together with its sibling, and Yamame, quite regardless of her earth spider’s will, found herself once more utterly naked.

Absurdly, it made her smile. It made her feel warm. It made her enormously pleased that, for all the bites he nursed, her human wanted to see her in this state all the same. It made her feel _at least_ half as pretty as he alleged she was.

“But you loved her, right?” Yamame hooked the adventuring hand and dragged it down. “Maybe she was about to fleece you – but you were only told afterwards, right? So, before that, you loved her.”

“… I don’t know about that. I was… _less than mature_ back then.”

“Then,” the spinstress sewed on, “Then, if you _hadn’t_ found out about me. What would have happened then? Would you have split anyway – even though she was good with her mouth?”

Paran blinked. “I didn’t say she was—”

Yamame puffed up her cheeks. “That is exactly what you said.”

The human winced. “… All right,” he gave. “Very good. If, by another twist, I hadn’t stumbled on that talk about you that day… well then, gods watching, I probably would have ended married to her. Married, having children, taking over the industry later down the line, and never getting involved with any over-curious spiders.” He grimaced. “I never would have tripped on a dark flight of stairs and gotten bit. I never would have had to walk miles and miles up and down the mountainside every odd week. I never would have had to look up those townsmen pliant enough morally to let a _youkai_ to… to…”

Paran’s jaw stuck open as a mounting fear snipped his sarcasm short.

Yamame Kurodani looked on even as his eyes shot wide – startled to something on her waist – and then back to her own. She watched him swallow the lock on his voice.

“… Yamame,” he croaked. “You…”

The spinstress brushed her hair back. “Yes? I’m what?”

Her human fumbled. “You’re… I mean, you’re a _youkai_. An earth spider. I’m a human. You can’t…”

“ _What_ can’t I?”

“ _Lady Satori_ could,” Paran blabbed on. “ _She_ could, I know, but…”

“What can Lady Satori do that I can’t?” demanded Yamame.

Paran’s free hand clapped flat over his mouth. Then, visibly sheepish about its actions, it curled into a bulging fist. Neither did that last; for Yamame’s lover soon splayed his fingers and raked them down his face.

“… Yamame,” he grated out at length. “You… You _can’t_ get pregnant – _can you?_ ”

“… Oh,” Yamame said poignantly. “Um… Oh.”

The man underneath her was staring at her sharply. “You _know_ what I mean.”

It had not been a question, but the spinstress answered just the same. “I know!” she said. “I know. Only, I’ve never—”

“Been?” Paran suggested.

“No!”

“… Tried?”

Yamame shook her loosed hair, exasperating. “ _Thought!_ ” she yelped. “I’ve never _thought_ about it! I’ve never had anyone interested in me that way.” The late understanding that _there was_ someone now, and close, tensed her spine all along. She squeezed her bottom lip between her teeth. “… The Oni liked my company, and Niku always had an appreciation for what I did, but never… Well, me. You were the first who wanted that. Not the Oni. Not anybody else. You.”

“Which helps us nothing,” Paran complained. He rested his eyes and groaned his frustration. “… What about Lady Satori?”

“She told me,” Yamame remembered, “She said that she’d had to… keep trying, for a long time.”

“You _asked her_ about this?” Her human radiated incredulity.

“She brought it up herself! I didn’t ask. I think… I believe that Lady Satori takes huge pride in that she was able to… to become a mother. I think.”

“Good for her.”

“Yes.” Yamame made a mindless nod. “Good. Good for her. Um…”

Her human, taking mercy (possibly pride as well), pried open his lovely eyes, and squinted them at the region of the spinstress where pregnancy things traditionally took place. “… Maybe,” he murmured, “Maybe I should be _more careful_ anyway.”

“About what?”

“About where—” He hesitated. “… About _the finish,_ Yamame. You know which.”

“Oh.” Yamame felt a hot wave work up her face. “Um. Yes. I mean, I know, but… I _liked_ that part. You didn’t?”

“To be blunt?” Paran scoffed. “It was the best feeling in the world. That is why, Yamame. That is why it wouldn’t do to get used to it. We aren’t ready. I don’t want you to quit your work – even if you might. Gods watching, I have something to prove still. I’m not done. Not close.”

Yamame nodded. “I don’t want to stop working, either.”

“That is to the good.”

“But I want to keep doing this as well,” she added. She smiled as she saw Paran’s mouth warp from inner pressures. “I’ve been looking, did you know that?” she pressed on. “Since I got a hold of your name, I’ve been hunting for ways to pay you back. To make you happy – in return for what you were doing for me. Maybe that was selfish, too; I won’t apologise for that. I’m a spider. We’re self-hearted creatures. But, when I found that I was able to make you feel like this? That I could make you happy – even for just forty seconds? That, there,” she told him. “That was the best feeling in the world. I don’t want it to stop, Paran. I want to make you happy. I want to make you feel good. I want you to make me feel good, too – but mostly, I want to make you.”

Her human blew a low, rumbling note out through his nostrils.

It was, guesswork put forward, a kind of humanly venting. One designed to prevent the cheeks of this human – and his chin, and even his neck – from heating up any redder than they already were.

“ _Fhaahn!_ ” he panted. Though, Yamame’s experience of human speech told her he might have wanted to say, “Fine.” The educated guess was proven when he spoke again. “Fine!” he gasped. “Gods, fine! I never wanted to stop myself. But, Yamame, not that. No… finishing in. Let’s not tempt it. Let’s not tempt _me._ Very good?”

The earth spider, Yamame Kurodani, smiled like one sensing its web jerk and strain under landed prey. “All right, Paran,” she declared, sincerity only one foot in her voice. “Very good, Paran. So… how about something else? To patch our losses? Anything you would like?”

And there it was again: the undecided once-over.

From the crown of her head to the tips of her toenails, and all across other bumpy areas – her human studied the possibilities Yamame Kurodani was presenting. Abjectly, she scolded herself for not presenting them better; still, at length, when Paran sucked in an exchange of air to fuel his answer, the spinstress conceded in a private corner of her mind that she might be closer three-fourths after all.

 _Three-fourths_ of how pretty he had said she was.

“… With you on top,” Paran gave up. “I want to do it… with you on top.”

“Why?”

“Because you look amazing from down here, Yamame.”

Yamame thrilled all over. _Five-fifths._ She grinned. “What else?”

Paran swallowed. “… With your mouth?”

 _Because Akkarin?_ a less pretty part of Yamame wondered. “That’s where my teeth are,” she noted. “You know?”

“It’s where your tongue is,” Paran pointed out. “So…”

“Ah. Um, yes. I suppose it is there. Mm. Very good. Anything else?”

“What about you?”

 _I want what you want,_ Yamame thought to herself. “I want you to touch me,” her voice said. All at once the spinstress realised the two answers had been swapped somewhere between her brain and her lips. “And maybe,” the words tumbled on out, “And maybe hold my hands. My arms. Hold them down. Or behind my back. And kiss me. And touch me more.” She peered down helplessly. “Um, Paran?…”

“Very good,” said Paran, very seriously. “… Anything else, Yamame?”

“Um… In my clothes?”

A shadow of disappointment flickered behind his eyes. “… You want to put your clothes back on?”

“No, no.” Yamame’s head twirled side to side. “Next time. I want to undress you, but I want to stay in my clothes. It’s just what I… what I imagined this morning. Is that weird?”

“Actually,” said Paran, “now you’ve put it in my head, it doesn’t seem as lethal.”

Yamame giggled at the familiar, lame-legged humour. Her amusement span into something rather less innocuous when she adjusted her seat, and found a tough obstacle. She glanced back over her shoulder.

“Paaaran?” she cooed.

Her human made a show of shrugging. It was a bad show, because at the same time, he levered himself up to a hunched sit on his arms.

“… All that talk about getting you pregnant,” he murmured, as soon as her neck had been satisfactorily smothered in tiny, sucking kisses. “It’s dangerous.”

“Yes. It is.” Yamame, tensing deliciously all over, scratched the nails of one hand down her human’s chest and abdomen. “So… Which one?”

“… Which what?”

She softly wrapped her fingers around his indecisive part. “Mouth,” she mouthed into his hair, “or me on top? Chop-chop. Or I’ll bite.”

The human Paran, he who took such threats at the heaviest gravity, quit marking her Sun-touched skin. He drew back, his brows fixed into a visage of unflappable seriousness.

Yamame almost burst when he said, “… Both.”

* * *

Waking up beside someone else, as Yamame Kurodani had already found, was an affair that was mostly muted. The waking-up part was an antidote of exciting. The real poison – the dangerous part – poured from what sometimes came next.

As she woke, aching and over-strained, the eldest of the earth spiders, Yamame Kurodani, blinked and yawned with dispatch – until sleepy tears rinsed the gum out of her eyes. Paran of the Human Village, her pillow, denied the good-morning kiss she pecked on his mouth, and slept on. The spinstress did not mind – overmuch. She loomed over him on all-fours, and stared his sleeping face down, recalling everything they had done to each other a mere few hours before. She committed some moments for later teasing. She counted the pinkish blood-marks on her shoulders and the insides of her elbows. She wondered which gods Paran had called when she had goaded his body for one final effort.

At length, she ran out of patience. She scurried, spider-slick, under the covers, to give him a more pointed wake-up.

Nobody came to invite or admit them to breakfast.

Nobody came, perhaps, because they bathed breakfast time away – one washing themselves, before switching with the other, to launder the towels lent to them by a rather more seasoned hostess. After, refreshed, a-cloth in dry dress and robe, walked by her spider’s acuity, Yamame and her human arrived in the mansion’s sumptuous ballroom, arm-in-arm, quite by themselves.

They had five steps in before Satori Komeiji judged the situation unsalvageable.

“Oh no,” the small hostess huffed at them over her dessert. “No, no, no. This simply won’t do. As a matter of fact, no. I’m going to finish this in my bedroom. Garion, if you’ll please? And Yamame? Yes. You, you giddy idiot. We’re going to have words about this – later, and just us. Are we understood? Gods above, never mind; don’t _think_ at me. I will see you later. Garion? Quickly, before I burn alive.”

And then, muttering, the tiny governess of Old Hell, swished by them for the ballroom’s exiting door. The corpse-thief of _Chirei-den,_ Kaenbyou Rin, followed her master on cat-bouncy feet. She curtsied in passing, a smile slicing out on her face to show she knew. The blond storyteller, Santuko “Garion” Takumi, graced them with a florid bow that could have meant anything. He filed, plates clattering, out after the other two.

A serving of breakfast had been mercifully laid aside for them on the table. Yamame and her human ate, quieter than they’d (have) been before this run-in.

The rest of the day would swing by in a dulcet buzz of idleness. The night… would not.

Three more such days would leaf past before Yamame’s sisters reported their investigation of her devastated home. Two would thread needles different enough from used to turn the spider’s attention. Then, Hachiashi would bring the news.

And then, something terrible would happen.

But first, two things.

( ) A Cat’s Loyalties  
( ) Among _Youkai_ , a Woman  
( ) A Storyteller’s Account


	34. Among youkai

(X) Among _Youkai_ , a Woman

The first thing caught in the second day’s morning.

Satori Komeiji span this web; no sooner had Yamame and her escort arrived to break their fast with the vicereine and her husband than its supports were neatly cast.

“Yamame, dear?” Lady Satori said. “Tell me. You are handy with a needle, yes?”

She smiled a mild smile as joy bloomed shamelessly out onto the spinstress’s face. The ploy had been simpleness; and yet, if one thing was there might lure Yamame’s mind away from more lately ones, it was the earth spider’s second-oldest passion.

There had always been talk that _Chirei-den_ ’s private chambers contained items of most unusual and esoteric merit, as is often the case with places trailing extended history. The Oni spoke of troves of vile treasure: stocks of rare wines, spiced with the rage of the damned and sweetened with the lust of licentious souls. A library of most evil grimoires – maddened wraiths sealed between the pages. A basement of black stone, where women were dragged and beaten – and worse. An enterprising thief looking to disburse Satori Komeiji’s wealth, said the Oni (usually into fast emptying cups), had therefore best be on their guard; for even without ill intent on the part of their owner (who, better to check, was not standing behind and listening), any centuries-old collection might have something malign festering at the back of a drawer.

Satori Komeiji, the tiny vicereine of Old Hell, knew these stories well. A great earnest wealth of them had the marked make of a heart very close to hers.

To her own mind, however, her new home had held few articles of worth beyond the castoffs the fleeing _Yama_ had forgotten in their once-retreat. An abundance of those castoffs was comprised by clothes. A lesser abundance of those, sewn for the stately judges of the Old Capital, ill fitted the house’s new, diminutive owner. A number of this lesser abundance nonetheless had her modest interest. So Lady Satori had told the grinning Yamame.

The breakfast was fast done; the men – diverted to chores. Though a niggling fly between her ears _burr_ ed jealously about her human entertaining himself in company otherwise than hers, the spinstress Yamame – sprawled half over her mental pulpit in excitement – whipped her feet to carry her after the tiny vicereine’s to her chambers.

Satori Komeiji’s “modest” inheritance belied the dread mind-reader’s shabby pick of everyday fashion.

As the wardrobe of the vicereine’s cosy bedroom was gutted of its contents, Yamame sat, dazzled on the bed, and watched as jewelled hats, gold-embroidered robes, and shirts buttoned with rows of Orichalcum studs were tossed, unceremoniously, on the sheets beside her. All were stunning; all, as one, un-ironed and unworn. Only nearby the back of the shelf (but, Yamame hoped, nothing malign) was a piece that stayed Lady Satori’s hands.

The piece was unfurled; and there, in the centre of Satori Komeiji’s apparent interest, was an old, overlong frock of such a mundane cut, it felt unreal it had been stashed together with the other treasures. The tiny mind-reader – abstracted, eyes misted over – raised the fabric to her face… and breathed in.

A sigh whispered between her pale lips. She mouthed a word… A name. A two-syllable name. It started with…

The violet eyes, focussing, swung their gaze at Yamame.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, as if sprung on in a private moment. “It doesn’t matter, and it hasn’t mattered for years now. She gave me the best she had, and now she is gone. I shan’t disturb her rest by speaking about her here.”

“… Someone important?” Yamame guessed.

Lady Satori tried to smile. It didn’t reach her eyes. “As a matter of fact, no. Not terribly. She _gave me_ something important, however. And then, she helped me deliver something even more so. She, herself, was only a woman. A simple, simple woman. I loved her.” The stark admission stole all of Yamame’s replies. Lady Satori chuckled her mirth. “Is it so strange, Yamame? That I can love? That I have? We’ve talked about this, haven’t we? It’s a part of that self-discovery you were beginning to grope your way around last we discussed our _what_ and _who._ As a matter of fact, I will tell you this, from experience. It is only embarrassing at the start.”

The spinstress had but to nod a bit dumbly to set the mind-reader to chuckling again.

“Never mind,” said Satori. “Never mind, Yamame. You’ll get a hang of it, soon. And speaking of hanging—” The small woman held the frock against her front, to reveal it miserably oversized. “Yes, well, you see what hangs and where. I’d like to be able to wear it, though. As a matter of fact, I mean it to be a… a memento, I suppose. I don’t go outside often, but on those occasions I do, I’d like to wear this. Yamame? Can it be done?”

Yamame startled to attention. “Um—” She blinked her distraction away. “Ye—Yes, I think— I can do it. A measuring tape. I will need a measuring tape. And needles, and thread, and scissors, and some pins, and—”

“I’ve an old sewing set somewhere in here,” Satori said, putting the frock down. “Nowhere as lavish as yours, I’m sure, but we’ll make do. As women are often made to do. No?”

A moment, and Yamame caught the clumsy attempt at fraternising.

“Mhm,” she volunteered back. “Yes. Making do is what we make do.”

That made her small hostess smile all the way to her eyes.

* * *

Minutes later, and Satori Komeiji was being smartly wrapped in a length of old (but serviceable) tailor’s tape.

When last Yamame had lain her eyes on Old Hell’s small authority, it had been in less private environs, and nowhere so close. Satori Komeiji back then had been summoned to adjudicate the rare dispute in the Capital requiring the involvement of her girls. The particulars had Yamame of now muddy; still, when she cast her thoughts hard into the memory, she found Lady Satori of then had been a pale and emaciated thing – pulled in faded teals and an unflattering pink.

Satori Komeiji these days was all but of a different brood.

Though her arms could yet make a spider envious, right enough; but, the colour filling the space inside her collar and sleeves was flush and only a shade whiter than Yamame’s own tincture. She had, too – when the tape was tightened round her waist – a decently hourglass-shape outline. The years since expanding her family had clearly not missed out expanding the tiny governess herself.

Yamame, lip tucked in, ejected the thought as soon as it had framed. And yet, if Satori Komeiji took amiss to scrutiny as well as measurement, she made little display of it – less a self-pleased smile.

“I won’t say it hasn’t had its upsides,” she allowed. “Change, I have noticed, doesn’t come easy to us _youkai_. It cost me a dear deal to come this far, and not all of it to the good, but… As I said, it’s had its upsides. As a matter of fact, if it lets me look less _emaciated_ in your eyes…”

The spinstress bit down on the drawn lip. Her mistaken curiosity lashed around for alternatives. It found one close.

“… Still,” she said, nudging Satori’s arms up into a cross-pose, “Still, I couldn’t imagine one of the _Yama_ dressing like this. It seems… Well, it seems inadequate. Compared to other pieces, I mean. It’s just… simple.”

Lady Satori’s head cast sidelong at the frock laid out on the bed. “Why,” she said, “that is probably because they never did. As a matter of fact, it never belonged to any _Yama._ As far as I can tell, anyway.”

Yamame frowned. “But you said—”

The tiny vicereine made a little throw with her chin. “It is called embellishment, Yamame. I wanted your attention; I embellished.” She sighed. “Would you have come here with me as happily as you did if I’d told you I wanted you to cut down one of Garion’s mother’s old rags so I could feed my overdeveloped sense of nostalgia? Would you, really?” Lady Satori paused, but the spinstress had no reply except a wounded look. “… Actually,” Satori apologised, “maybe you would have. I’m sorry, Yamame. I’ve been keeping company with two very dishonest creatures; I forgot what it was like – speaking to those whose minds don’t necessitate digging labyrinths around them. But, one thing I can’t overstate – I really want to be able to wear this. Really.”

 _That would have been enough for me,_ thought Yamame. _Really._

“And I should have known. I’m sorry,” Lady Satori repeated.

The earth spider, scratching the figures of Satori Komeiji’s dimensions into a lateral part of her mind, stepped behind the small woman. She pulled the two thin, outstretched arms down, and unfurled the tape again. It crackled with age as she did.

“… I had a sense,” Yamame began, “that I’d seen this pattern before. So, it was—”

“His mother’s, yes,” Satori confirmed. “And yes, San has her own piece like this. Well, not so. As a matter of fact, that one was originally mine. Garion’s mother and I made it over our first wintering together; although, to be fair to her, I did little else besides standing to measure and watching. San asked if she could have it when she started her escapades around the Underworld – for luck, if you believed what she said. I lent it to her, on the condition she returns it soon… and couldn’t touch it since. Now her grandmother’s gone, I just don’t dare to ask for it back. I still want my piece, though. I want something to remind me of that winter. San just isn’t that carry-able anymore, you know?”

Yamame Kurodani, the yearly malady, did not react to the joke.

The spider spinstress hovered on above the vicereine’s narrow shoulders, even as a strange and inexplicable question slowly swirled into definition on her tongue.

“… What is it like?” she asked at length. “Being a mother?”

Lady Satori’s answer proved slow to match. “… Satisfying, in the end,” she finally confessed. “Mind, it _started off_ nothing but,” she added, crisper. “Over time, however, it had a wide opportunity to grow less so. As a matter of fact, it grew heavy and ungainly. Tiring. Then irritating. Then painful. It made me scream, and Orin to avoid me for weeks. It cost me every last one of my favourite teacups. It made me hate my dear Garion for ever doing it to me. It made me cry through a whole night after I had inadvertently told him so one evening. At volume, too, if I recall. And all that still had been nothing – divinities, _nothing_ – next to what happened all of a sudden some nine months in.” Lady Satori smiled. “On the whole, I can’t recommend it.”

Now Yamame did grace the humour. “But,” she giggled, “in the end—”

“In the end, I am immensely satisfied,” Satori chuckled back. “Mind, this is after a year’s worth of half-slept nights and about four more whittled away worrying constantly. The feeding part was nice, I suppose… Although, I shudder when I picture having to puzzle out a baby’s crying without my unique crutch. San is lucky I am her mother; I can’t much feature any other ever figuring out her particular whims.”

 _Three-and-twenty,_ Yamame noted inside diligently. She switched the tape around. _Three-nought, less the collar._ “… Mhm,” she murmured. “She… San, she visited on me a bit ago, yes? She didn’t, um… cry, or anything, but she was… _hard to keep up_ with,” she decided diplomatically. “She talked very fast. And a lot.”

 _And at volume,_ she added inside.

Lady Satori looked back, attired in a pretty grin. “She did, didn’t she? And she faults me for picking up bad habits from her father! They had a big falling out once upon a time, did you know that?”

Yamame had not. “No.” _One-and-eight for the cleavage._

“They did, though,” Satori went on after a dirty look. “Nothing much too complex behind it, but I grant you that is the rule with most tragedies. The short of it is, San, Garion and I were celebrating her third birthday with her grandparents in the Human Village, when Rin—”

“That’s not what it’s called,” Yamame chimed in.

The tiny vicereine _pff_ ed. “It’s what we _youkai_ call it, isn’t it? That’s _what_ it is at the end of the day. At any rate, if we’ll put semantics aside for a moment, we were merrily whiling the week away when Rin paid us a visit with news from the Capital. News that didn’t really _need_ my attention, but had nonetheless been rude enough to demand it. So, I left my family and flew back to the Underworld on my own. I arrived, gave the author of the summons and earful, and when the incident was resolved – miraculously only two or so days later – I went back. Two days had been enough to make me miss everyone, and it had certainly been enough to make them miss me. That was, perhaps, what lay at the core of the problem.” Lady Satori paused. “Yamame? I will need to let you in on a secret here. San can’t _really_ read thoughts, see.”

Yamame’s fingers froze. “… What?”

That had been surprising.

The Oni (others as well) of the Capital, the earth spider knew, had ever deferred to the clan Komeiji for the sole reason their evil talents kept all of them in line; to know one now bossed them around who possessed no such edge upset everything Yamame had been taught while living in the subterranean city. Never mind the spinstress or her sisters (who had, anyway, little to upset about most of the time); was this something that should be let known at all? Were the less innocent souls of the Capital to learn this overbearing stripling who strutted among them was not a complete Komeiji after all – what then?

San’s little mother fanned her daughter’s continued safety away with a hand. “Very funny. Anyhow, that is not the entire truth. San _can_ read thoughts; her sight is just severely blunted. She can, oddly, skim surface thoughts if I’m there to be her proxy, but on her own it’s not unlike listening in on a conversation in the room behind the wall. She can hear the _sound_ , the timbre, flow – but it’s just not articulate enough to carry a concrete meaning. She has learned to compensate, of course; she can mostly guesswork her way around this by the sound of people’s thoughts and their outward behaviour, and this does it for most. That is, however, not her strongest suit. Her strongest one is _reading hearts._ ”

“Wait. Wasn’t that what your ability was?”

“Oh, I’ve called it that, I grant you,” the tiny vicereine acknowledged. “It sounds poetic, and that does wondrously with your Oni friends. They are a sentimental lot. As for the prosaic, my ability is to read thoughts… and those don’t come out of your chest. I see conscious processes – language, images, recollections; I can call them up, if I should desire. San’s ability reaches deeper than that. It reaches into the heart.”

“I don’t understand. What’s the difference?” Yamame wanted to know.

“How should I visualise it…?” Lady Satori made a pondering sound. “… All right, let us set up an example. Suppose you had a bottle of exquisite alcohol you’d got as a gift from a friend. Suppose you were transporting it to your kitchen – to pour it into something more appreciable than a simple bottle. Suppose that you tripped and fell on your way – and smashed the bottle on the floor. What would you think then? _‘Oh no,’_ perhaps? _‘Aw, I wanted to drink that, drat?’_ _‘My Oni big brother is going to kill me; this cost him an arm and a leg?’_ ” She quit putting on a silly voice. “These, Yamame, are the thoughts I would read. I could, therefrom, extrapolate your general state; I could, if I wished, goad your mind onto paths and into associations that might lead me to whatever other thoughts I wanted to excise from you. San’s ability bypasses all this. Her Third Eye – wherever it is hiding – peers straight into your mental bedrock. The base, underlying anger, or regret, or fear, or whichever thing else that drives all of your higher processes. She reads your thoughts _before_ they are filtered through your conscious mind. She sees, if you will, _into your heart._ ”

Yamame’s heart chilled. “How does that—”

“To her pretty eyes? Simply.” Satori shrugged. “I’ve happened to be around to watch her exercise, and it is simplicity indeed. She did, very early on, rationalise her ability as an aspect of her sight, and likened the emotions she perceived to base colours. Her mind has internalised this; and now, she works with it – if you’ll excuse – in mind. More distressingly, since colour is a quality of light, and light can be dimmed or intensified, she is learning to do just that as well.” The dread mind-reader shivered. “… One day,” she said, quietly, “when she was four and only stumbled on this ability, she – not much wittingly then, I suspect – caused Rin to become utterly and deliriously happy. For _hours_. The happiest cat in the world, Yamame – for _no reason whatsoever._ And Rin herself thought nothing of it afterwards. As a matter of fact, she thought it wholly natural. I had to take steps right then, as you may surmise.”

Yamame, kneeling, hooked the tape around the band of Satori’s skirt and stretched it down along one of the vicereine’s legs. The leg was, the spinstress registered in passing, slim, smooth and – as Ashi might have put it – as long as the ground. An intruding thought suggested she should ask her human after his opinion. Then smack him.

“… So, what about the falling-out?” she asked. “I mean, of San and her father. You said—”

“That they had a tragic one once, yes.” Lady Satori dodged past the commentary on her locomotion. “Now you know what San’s ability is, you will understand. When I came back, Garion was the first to spot me. That blond oaf has always been stubbornly overprotective of me; since I had left on my own, however, he had been especially upset. So, when he saw me, that haystack head of his positively flooded with all kinds of intense feelings. It quite eclipsed everything else… including, I fear, his love for our daughter. And San was unfortunate enough to be standing right behind when it happened.” San’s little mother sighed her sympathy. “Imagine, Yamame, witnessing someone you love instantly forget all about you in favour of someone else. That kind of thing can break a girl’s heart. And, in that case, it very much did.” She shook her head sadly. “They are mostly over it these days,” she concluded. “But it changed their day-to-day relations, not to mention rather souring what could have been their best years together. Both of them regret it deep inside.”

“… I see.”

Satori laughed. “I wish they had your keen spider’s eyes, then.” She cast back over a shoulder. “… Are we done, then? Yamame?”

The spinstress, who had stood up and filed away the final figures even as Lady Satori had been relaying this last (somewhat personal) story, had the hand gripping the well-serviced tape squeezed into a tight fist.

She did not know, she realised when Lady Satori swivelled around, how she should situate herself against being told these things. She had never held Old Hell’s tiny governess in the highest of regards. Neither had they ever been anything more than formal acquaintances at the best of times; even now, she felt, they were little above allies bound by circumstance. To be permitted into Satori Komeiji’s private world should have marked Yamame as her friend… but, as the dread mind-reader herself had said, this was an arrangement which would only harm everyone in the end.

Why, then? Why had she, who eschewed friends, still shared these awfully personal experiences?

A less grateful piece of Yamame speculated that perhaps Satori Komeiji had not _shared_ anything. That, in her windfall find of someone in a similar circumstance, the tiny vicereine sought to vocalise the feelings she had, in her friendless existence, never had an ample recipient to do with. That perhaps the entire conversation had not been meant for the benefit of her – of Yamame – but of someone else altogether.

That someone was smirking up at her with enthusiasm.

“Wrong again, dear spider,” Lady Satori intoned – before her expression softened. “… Is what I would have liked to say, if you hadn’t been such a bastion of honesty. No, you aren’t wrong; not entirely, anyway. As a matter of fact, maybe I am in the wrong for saddling you with all that. Of course, as my Garion could tell you, I am self-focused, conceited, and a holder of many an opinion I love to hold high above everyone else’s. So, let’s just share the blame and call it a day, shall we? Half-and-half?”

“Um—” Yamame rushed to evaluate the transaction. “… OK?”

“Good. Good…” Lady Satori, sighing once more, let her shoulders slump. Her eyes – the upper two, at any rate – wandered again to the frock waiting on the bed. “… That wasn’t _all_ terrible, was it?” she murmured, all but to herself. “It’s been a while since I’ve had this done to me. It brought back some pleasant memories. If for nothing else, then I am thankful for that. Yamame? You’re going to want to get at it now, aren’t you?”

The spinstress nodded. “Yes. While I still have the—”

“My sizes fresh in your head,” Satori finished. “All right. How long are you going to need?”

“A few hours?” Yamame guessed. “It’s not all that difficult, when you get to it – just lengthy. The undoing and re-doing of stitching takes a while by hand. I should have it done by evening.”

It was a pretty pass when those with Satori Komeiji’s insight were taken by surprise – but in this instance, Yamame found the tiny vicereine’s brows clambering over each other mostly funny.

Then, the eyes below them narrowed, even as an idea shaped in the one heart in the Underworld which had never been known by someone else.

“… Well then,” said Satori Komeiji, dignity recovered. “You might just see something very special tonight.”

* * *

(X) A Cat’s Loyalties

An evening did come, however those did in _Chirei-den_ ’s clockless halls.

At least so she gauged. Within the handful of hours (they had to be) since dedicating to Satori Komeiji’s keepsake, Yamame had undone and done again the unassuming, all-important piece. She had detached and scissored the sleeves to length. She had worked the borders over, and sewn them on anew with a subtle, tuck-under stitch which would cover up all tells of tampering. She had – on another, more creative thought – ripped the weathered trim off the hanging skirt, and finished it instead with a hemstitch of those subterranean roses the small governess seemed to adore. She had referred her needle-sharp eyes to the effects of her work for another half hour on end… before at last deeming them marginally good enough to present.

None had bothered the spider in her work.

None had, perhaps, because Satori Komeiji had shooed the spinstress off to her guest-room ahead her fingers had been engaged. Nor had her human shown up to shower her mind with distractions; and Yamame Kurodani, who had much doubted this had been part of Paran’s design, discovered why as soon as arriving back before the vicereine’s private chambers.

A curious scene was folding out in Satori Komeiji’s bedroom when she opened the door.

The wicker set at the side of the room was busied beyond capacity. On one chair, hunched halfway over, the big Paran was sat – scowling ahead at the _Shōgi_ board laid out on the table; on the other, his blond neighbour was seated, his ghost-grey gaze bored into a sheepskin-bound book. Atop his lap, settled in comfortably, the eldest Komeiji herself was perching – her focus trained to full on the game-board and its manoeuvring pieces.

On the bed, on her belly, tails snaking in the air, Orin lay looking on it all with immitigable boredom.

Yamame would have laughed. That her human was willingly suffering the mind-reader’s presence was laughable enough; that he was matching her in a game was – lightly put – riotous. Her human’s confidence had clearly been stamped and bolstered; likely, it had been bolstered even further the previous evening – when he and Yamame had sat with Lady Satori and her husband in these very chambers, and listened as the blond storyteller had relayed to them the lost history of the Palace of Earth Spirits.

The story had begun innocently; and yet, inside the next minutes, Garion had tied them all into his narration – addressing them as though he had been the High Lord of the _Yama_ , and they – his assembled bureaucrats. The fate of the outcast Oni had been the matter of that judgement; and though Yamame had pleaded for the horned folk from the bottom of her heart, the pronouncement had been long foregone. The Oni had defied their universal purpose – and had to be chastised.

 _Chastised how_ had been the pursuing point. It was one which Paran and Lady Satori had argued at incensed length… and _entirely in role._

Yamame smiled. That they were competing again now (and just so inanely) would have had her on the floor in stitches… except, all at once as she entered, Lady Satori threw the game altogether and smoothly slid down from her husband’s lap.

“Is it done?” she asked the returned spinstress.

Yamame made a nod. “Yes. It’s—”

“In your room,” Lady Satori agreed. “Yes. I’ll go and try it on, then.”

“Will you need me to—”

Old Hell’s paramount authority fanned her tiny hand in dismissal. “I’m sure it’ll be a perfect fit. As a matter of fact, I’ll be put out if it’s anything but. What with your thorough precautions… I joke, Yamame,” she chided, “quit that frown. I’ll go put it on and come back. Sit down and wait. I’ll only be a few minutes.”

And then, heeding no word of humility further, she skimmed out the room on slippered feet, easing the door shut behind.

The eldest of the Underworld’s spinstresses, faintly dejected, stared after her hostess for a moment. A long enough one, so it became, for Paran to locate and rope his voice in its span. Though, not at all for her.

“… Going to pick up?” he asked Lady Satori’s whilom cushion.

Garion _thump_ ed close his book, and rounded on the crunching chair. He regarded the board with some amusement. “Why not?” he decided.

Stripped of anyone’s abiding attention, Yamame Kurodani, rethreading Lady Satori’s advice, went on to rest her legs atop the vicereine’s vicereine-sized bed. As she did so – and the men began to cannon their wits from atop crackling wicker – something else just as strange came to pass beside the earth spider.

Rin Kaenbyou, the corpse-thief of _Chirei-den_ , snapped up to a sit.

Cat-ears flicking, the most notorious of Satori Komeiji’s pets then slunk on all-fours down the edge of the bed; both black-slit eyes ahead, cat-quick and silent to match, she padded for the occupied table. She came up at Lady Satori’s husband’s side…

… And, heedless of the implications, squirmed under his arm and up onto her master’s (should have been) exclusive spot.

The man Garion – if he had ever reckoned with these implications himself – did all the same not appear to mind overmuch. _Nor notice,_ Yamame realised the longer she stared on. Though the cat-she nested in her place awfully; though she tugged the blond storyteller’s free hand up to her head; though she purred without shame when he started to thumb the edges of her ears as if testing the whet of a knife. All the while, Lady Satori’s blond husband kept an undivided and indivisible watch on his opponent’s moves. And Orin purred on.

Who did notice (and mind to boot) was the opponent himself; and Paran, whose arm was hovering stiffly over the board mid-turn, did at last comment on his increased competition.

“… You two are friendly,” he noted.

The blond Garion, peeking down at the _youkai_ borrowing his lap, loosed his mouth open. Not for a want of words – as both Paran and Yamame were about to discover – only for the pick. The storyteller inflated his chest, at the same time as he squeezed his fingers around one of Orin’s fuzzy ears.

“Our Orin and I,” he began, “have walked together a lengthy road. Yes, indeed,” he intoned; “a long and toilsome way we have come. We have walked roads and lacks of roads, leapt hills hand-in-hand, and dove down sightless holes in the earth. We are long companions.”

Paran scoffed. Then he completed his move. “What would the folks in our town say?”

Garion’s lips pursed… though whether at this thread of questioning or at the new situation on the board went unsaid. “… What-ever do you mean?” he asked after a pause.

“A human,” said Paran, eyeing him, “snuggling up with a _youkai_.”

“ _Oooh,_ ” drawled Lady Satori’s husband. He issued a thin smile. “Knowing those? Why, I imagine they would gossip. Maliciously and, I feel… not without a certain snubbing of status.”

Yamame’s human aped a wince. “Oof,” he acknowledged.

“All misbegotten, we will for certes agree,” Garion went on (and his fiddling Orin’s ears as well); “we are, after all, what we are – humans and _youkai_ both. Satori would talk the hairs on your skull grey should you touch on this; still, it is our own truth. Orin does what she does, likes what she likes – no evil interred.” He chuckled at his own wordplay. “But,” he gave, “what she is also, is a cat. And cats ally to those they like.”

“Why does she like you?”

Garion made a shrug – as far, anyway, as his occupancy with the cat allowed. “Who-ever can say?” he wondered aloud. “Mayhaps ‘tis my silver tongue she likes. Mayhaps the roads we have walked. Mayhaps remembers she the grand debt I owe to her… and has it I reimburse it thus. Mayhaps—” he pushed one of his pieces forward on the board, “—that Orin shall never tell. After all, cats are ever a secretive species. Yes, indeed tight-lipped.”

“And little brother,” moaned Orin, “is ever looser than a ripped sock.”

Garion faked a gasp. “The cat has spoken!” He braced against a swipe from the cat-maid’s curled fingers. “The cat has hit me,” he complained.

“Little brother thinks himself a talker,” declared the cat. “His mouth is big, but his head is stuffed with naught but fluff. He does not know what Orin knows.”

“That is our problem, more or less,” Garion agreed. “No?”

The last bit, which had been aimed at Paran, cued Yamame’s partner to ask, “Why _do_ you like him, then?”

“He poses a good query,” said Garion. “Why do you? Orin?”

Rin Kaenbyou’s tails whipped – then whelmed snugly about one of Garion’s thighs. “It is little sister’s thought,” the cat-she huffed, “that little brother is ill of mind, taking queries from those who do not exist. Yes, ill, ill of mind. But for it is a simple one, she would not have bothered an answer at all.”

“Indulge us.”

The corpse-thief of _Chirei-den_ , Satori Komeiji’s pet attendant, she whose actions had led the Underworld to be cracked open again, wriggled about in her owner’s partner’s arms and stuffed her nose into his clothing.

“As he so wishes,” she purred, “little brother _smells nice._ ”

Somewhere outside the conversation, an earth spider shuddered.

Lady Satori’s blond husband frowned. No less perplexed than his two unlikely charges, he stared on at the red-braided creature nosing around in his shirt. “And that,” he said, soured, “is all that you like of me, I suppose?”

Orin made a pleased sound. “No,” she said. “Not all, no. As well that little brother distracts Master Satori when little sisters needs must sneak behind her back.”

“ _What use,_ ” Garion marvelled sarcastically.

“As well,” the cat-maid praised on, “that he gave little sister young master San to play with.”

“ _What,_ ” sighed Garion, “ _use._ ” He peered across to Paran – who had watched the unveiling of the cat’s secrets with an oily grin waxing above his chin. “… There you have it,” gave up Lady Satori’s husband. “There I have it, as well. Ask ye a foppish question…”

“It’s important to smell nice,” offered Paran.

Almost Garion would have shot back an ample pitched retort; only then, a diversion from the hinterlands came and knocked his aim off the mark.

“Why do you like Lady Satori?” Yamame asked from the bed.

Rin Kaenbyou, never sparing a glance, replied. “Master Satori is kind.”

The spinstress skewed a smile at the description. “The Oni would call you a liar,” she said. _I would,_ she added inside, _if we were in any place that isn’t here._

The corpse-thief of _Chirei-den_ sniffed. “Master Satori has a function in Old Hell,” she insisted. “She is angry when this is unfulfilled, and isn’t kind in those times. They are alike in this, Old Hell and little sister’s Master. Sister Yamame should know, friend of everyone such as she is.”

 _Am I?_ “… And when she isn’t angry?” the friend of everyone pressed on.

“Then,” declared Orin, “Master Satori is the kindest. When the doors are closed, when Old Hell is calm, then Master Satori is at ease. Then she is kind. Orin knows it; her sisters know it. Little brother knows it, even if he should wish Orin didn’t know. Master Satori is kind and soft and nice to touch. _Mnnr._ ”

A muted noise vibrated up from the cat’s throat when one of her perking ears was squeezed.

“Now, little sister,” warned Garion, “I don’t know that these two need to hear these sorts of things – do you?”

“Master Satori is kiiind,” Orin insisted. “Orin _knows._ ”

And that, cat-stubbornly, was final.

A few promised minutes in pass, and Satori Komeiji did make her return. And a triage of odd happenings was completed.

As the small governess walked in, flowery and regal in her restored dress, all the eyes in the room were at once rounded up. All at once that they were, Yamame Kurodani filed the flaws in her work that were now painfully visible; the collar, after all, was too wide; the mid-section of the piece – too spacious for Lady Satori’s delicate frame. She wore it well overall, did the small mind-reader – very well, if the stares were telling – but Yamame’s critical mind saw spaces for improvements all the same. Spaces which, if the stares _were_ telling, weren’t lost on the less expert eyes either.

But then, something else told differently.

At the table, lurching as if from sleep, the ghost-like Garion shifted into motion. No sound but for the wicker’s warning groan, the blond storyteller picked Orin up by the flanks, and deposited her to the side. On he stood up – to two plainly rigid legs, and – slowly, as though in a dream still – wobbled over to where Lady Satori was patiently waiting. He froze to a stop in front of her.

… And then, folding onto one knee, he quietly threw his arms about her, and buried his face in the front of the familiar dress.

The eldest of clan Komeiji, the sole authority over Old Hell, she dreaded by all in the Underworld, was a picture of motherly care when she wormed her tiny arms free and began petting the blond man’s haystack-like head.

“Yes,” she crooned at him, softly. “There… Yes. I know. I know… Me too.”

The crooning went on, the moment stretched… but, at length, Satori Komeiji detached her gaze from her husband, and slid it up – until it met and joined with Paran’s.

The dread mind-reader gave Yamame’s human a warm smile. “Thank you,” she told him.

Paran’s mouth quirked. He blushed, and said nothing. That made Lady Satori smile all the warmer.

There were no more smiles to share when she matched at last Yamame’s own staring; but, when she spoke, her voice was the most honest thing the earth spider had heard from anyone in Old Hell’s lawless realms.

“And thank you, Yamame,” she said, simply. “You’ve done very well.”

Yamame Kurodani – simply – nodded her acknowledgement. And, as Lady Satori’s husband peeled away from his wife – wiping discreetly at his eyes – the eldest of the Underworld’s spinstresses thought, just this once, that she could probably leave the dress – with its mid-section and its collar – as it was.

* * *


	35. Final choice

Two nights hence were passed. And on the fourth morning altogether, Hachiashi came to make her report.

It had begun as all lately ones had for Yamame and her human. Taking their breakfast together with their hosts, doing their damnedest not to attract Satori Komeiji’s Third Eye; it was Orin’s ears flickering – and her back stringing bow-taut – which ultimately brought them all up short.

Lady Satori, her talent speaking, caught the cat-maid’s meaning in an instant. A nod of appreciation, and she swapped her attention from cat to spider.

“You’ve got a visitor, Yamame,” she said.

Nor had the spinstress to be told twice. She slid away her food and herself from the table. She startled – then smiled sheepishly – when Paran did the same beside her. The stranded two bowed their excuses to Lady Satori and her husband, and hurried out the dining hall for the mansion’s faraway front door. It felt full fifteen minutes (but no clock was telling) before they emerged to the wind-whipped gardens of the Palace of Earth Spirits.

Amid the raised flowerbeds, wringing with sweat, entombed by the Heart Chamber’s magma heat, Yamame’s jet-haired younger sister was restlessly waiting. As the elder spinstress hastily approached, Hachiashi – fanning her brow with a palm – cast a nasty scowl around the environs.

“What a dismal, bloody place,” she opined. “Why haven’t you done anything for it yet?”

Yamame Kurodani, the great architect of the Underworld, had to smile.

 _I will never correct this one,_ she realised, even as the younger spider peeled the sweat from her arms with disgust. Hachiashi’s ever-glowing views on her abilities were a keening reminder of the elder spider’s station within her brood… and the younger one’s _personal_ tragedy.

For here was Hachiashi. Here was an earth spider who, called on for aid by her betters, had dutifully done her part. Here was one of those despised creatures who, seeing a human come up in her sister’s tow, only flicked her sweat at him in playful spite. Here was the one among the Underworld’s spinstresses (less Yamame) who could bully her siblings into a selfless action – and wake next day with all her limbs still attached.

Here was the _second-best_ of the earth spiders… who nonetheless refused to compare herself to all but the one she could _never equal._

“… Sorry,” said Yamame. “It’s the roses, I think. They give it that blood-like shade.”

Ashi amused the answer with a snort. “Very funny, Yams. But no. It’s _everything_ here, dear sister. The bleeding cave, the bleeding lava, the bleeding house. And its bleeding owner.”

“You don’t want to come inside?” Yamame asked. “Say hello? Have something to eat?”

“As if the mind-leech would deign to feed me. No, Yams. Thanks – but no, thanks.”

The elder spider’s smile curled down. “She isn’t _that_ bad, you know? She can be polite.”

Ashi scoffed. “To you, Yams? We _all_ are. Her bleeding highness should dare no different – or we’d all come down here and give her a piece of our minds… _without_ her leave.” Her head shook left and right, tossing the jet-slick hair. “No, Yams. I don’t want to come in. I don’t want to see her, and she doesn’t want to see me. I’m nowhere as tolerant as you, dear sister; I’d have her ladyship out of her hide by the end of the minute – and, call me starch-arsed, but I don’t reckon the younger one’s ready to take up the crown just yet.”

“She doesn’t wear a crown,” Yamame said.

Ashi blew out an impatient sigh. “Not least because she’d positively crumple under the weight.” She groaned. “Yams, could we get down to actually important stuff? The longer I stand melting out here, the likelier she’ll find a window looking out this side. And I dare say even she shouldn’t be parted with her hide so soon. She does help keep order around these parts, more or less. I’d rather it didn’t all fall down on our heads yet.”

Yamame, starching her own back, made a shallow nod. “… All right,” she said. “What have you found?”

Against her every barbed answer, Hachiashi – the second-best – stalled for a while still. She looked to the silent Paran, seemingly for no reason but to hang her carmine eyes on something un-bloody. She stuck out her tongue when the look was returned.

And then, again to Yamame.

“… Not much,” Ashi said finally, “… is what I’d say if I were inclined to lie to you, dear sister. The truth is, we found _a lot._ All of it very messy. And, the worst part is, very, very familiar.”

“Then,” said Yamame, “it _was_ …”

The younger spider reeled in the hanging thread. “Your house, yes,” she japed without much humour; “but, more cuttingly, it was very marked a spider’s work. A whiff of that poison should have told you everything, Yams; and the dissolvent… Well, we both know how that works.”

“How… How _bad_ was it?” Yamame wanted to know. “I mean, was it all rendered down? I was only there a few moments before I… before I _had to_ run. Some of it was still standing then.”

“Some of it,” Ashi said archly, “is still standing even now. Although, if I’m bluntly honest – and I am – you’ll have little use of it less as firewood. It’d have to be cleaned up and dried, too. Anything softer, and it’s pretty much turned to sludge. I’m sorry, Yams, but that includes your scraps. And your bed… and the rest. There really wasn’t too much we could do. We sieved up some glass from the windows and some cookery implements. Your stove’s rusted all over; but, if you scrubbed that off, you could probably still use it. Maybe. Otherwise…”

Ashi shrugged her helplessness.

Might be, the distance of days had cushioned the loss. Might be, the intervening gains had balanced it out some; might be, Yamame Kurodani would only feel its pregnant weight later, once she sat down and catalogued everything that had been destroyed. Might be, nothing had been cushioned – and the eldest of earth spiders clung on only by the thread of seniority before her less aged sister.

She grasped that thread. She clutched it, wound it round her fingers, and squeezed it hard.

“… If it was spider’s poison,” she hissed, deathly quiet; “if it _was_ one of ours, Ashi…”

The younger spider blinked. “Wha— Oh no, _no-no-no-no_ ,” she sputtered. “Gods above, Yams, no! We would never— Well, I mean, if we were _really_ starved for attention… Stop glaring, you’re scaring me stiff! No, Yams. Not this time. We _know_ who did it – and it was none of ours.”

All the needles in Yamame’s mental drawers unthreaded as one.

“… What?”

“We know who—” Hachiashi gulped down the ball of stiffness that must have swollen up in her throat. “Well, we know _what_ did it, anyway. Or what did it _probably._ Or what might have.”

“… Talk.”

The younger spinstress managed out a tense nod. “… All right. Well. While we were there – dredging up those kitchen stuffs – someone… something, as like as not what did it, fancied swinging by. Now, I know, Yams. I know. We would have caught it – but for none of us had as much as sensed it before it had all but left.”

Yamame fixed her sister with a sticky stare. “How?”

“… Here’s the thing,” Ashi confessed. “I _don’t know._ It must have come from deeper down – brushed right by our backs – but none of us saw it until it was halfway to the exiting tunnel. The one up, that you use.”

“How?”

“Gods above, I don’t know! We were just padding around, searching, when Nikiba blundered she could hear someone crying. So we right up, about to call her _Nut-_ kiba and have a laugh – you know how we are – when it hits us, too. And bleeding sure enough, we turn around, and there’s… someone… making for that tunnel. Well past us, too.”

Yamame folded her arms under her chest. “And you didn’t chase them?”

Ashi’s ruby eyes clenched close. “ _Yams,_ ” she grated, “you might be the genius among us numb-nuts, but that doesn’t give you exclusivity to base bloody reasoning. Yes, we did chase it. But it had a lead on us, and… Yams, it _eluded_ us. Nikiba – bless that numb-nut in particular – she almost had it right near the top, but then she just… just stopped. Like her head blanked out. Later, she told us she had seen it fade into thin air right as she’d caught up. And, I promise you, Yams – she was _not_ in her cups that evening. Well, not until later, anyway.”

“And the rest of you? You just stopped as well?”

Ashi’s ember eyes sprung open, aglow with indignation. She threw out her arms. “What were we supposed to do? We _don’t_ go out to the surface without you – or without your permission. We know the rules. That _you’re_ vouched for and accepted doesn’t mean the rest of us magically are as well, sister. We’ve a nice home here. We don’t want to give anyone a nice, fat excuse to roll on down and cock it up for us in revenge for some perceived crime. We’ve all about had enough of that. We like it here. We don’t want to mess it up.”

Yamame recoiled as though she had been struck. “… Sorry,” she pushed out. “I thought—”

The younger spider smacked it away. “No, Yams,” she said. “You didn’t. You assumed. You assumed, because you are, that we are all in as good and wide celebration as you are. You assumed that, because you would have done it this way, that we would run the thing down, maybe knock a few trees over on the way, and when the Hakurei witch or whoever else came to check out the noise, that we would just smile prettily and all would be forgiven. Why, that might just have worked, too… _for you,_ Yams. _You_ have a pretty smile. Not us.”

The elder spider slumped her head. “… Sorry.”

“… Never mind,” groaned Hachiashi. “Never mind, Yams. You’d like if we were all as good as you. Not your fault that we aren’t. You bleeding blond star of the Underworld…” Wrong-footed, imbalanced by her own humours, the smaller Hachiashi rolled a mollifying lock of her own (evidently not blond) hair between the tips of her fingers. “… Here are the cold, dry facts, sister,” she offered at length. “Whatever did that to your home, it’s not above hanging close by the scene of the crime. It may even be camped up by the mouth of that tunnel, just waiting for us to rear our heads. And that, there, is what makes it spooky.”

“Spooky?” Yamame frowned. “How? We are earth spiders. There is no poison that can do us harm. How is that—”

Ashi groaned her exasperation. “Were you listening at all, Yams? That’s not the spooky part. I adore you, sister, I really do, but your head’s thicker than a brick of clay sometimes. Or did you perhaps want me to plead to you with a better solution? Very well, I’ll plead. I plead that you stay out of this net. Get a word out to… to Hakurei, plague take her, or whoever else that your Komeiji lady deems fit for the job. Whatever it is, it’s us spiders it doesn’t like. Send someone else to make it leave us alone.”

Yamame Kurodani could scarcely believe what her ears were telling her. “… Are you afraid, Ashi?”

The younger spider pulled her shoulders in. “I’m spooked, Yams. There’s a difference.”

 _But I,_ thought Yamame, _am not._

Though the mother of plagues had but to look at her sister to see Hachiashi may be ill at ease to hear so; but if she had to bet her power against the upstart’s which had devastated her home, then there was scant little doubt in Yamame’s heart that she would win out that bet. The poison which had consumed her home had been of spider make; still, potent as it had been, the few brief moments she had bathed in it had already seen her physiology start solving out a countermeasure. If the thing at fault – as second-best (and unaware) Hachiashi had suspected it – was yet at large nearby her nest, then trimming off this incident was as easy as crawling up to the surface and throttling it into conformity.

That, and rebuilding after.

A decision, one she sensed was last for a time, buzzed up to the fore of her mind; and Yamame, spreading her web, knew…

( ) … That she could not take the risk.  
( ) … That she should end it herself.

* * *

(X) … That she should end it herself.

“… No.” Yamame Kurodani tossed her (blond Underworld star) hair left and right. “No,” she repeated, firmer. “I won’t feel it’s closed… unless I do it myself.”

Hachiashi gave her a look. It was the look of a spider who had binged the night away on snacks and plum wine; it was the look of one who rose the next morning stuffy-mouthed, afoul of the nastiest migraine, and loured at her mirror self with retroactive hate.

It was the look of a sister who had expected no other answer… but had ill liked it all the same.

Yamame put forward what she hoped was a soothing smile. “I’ve deserved a bit of revenge, haven’t I? It was my home. I’d built it. I’d kick myself in the shins for the next hundred years if I let the Hakurei or someone else deal it out for me.”

Ashi issued a sound which put her sister in mind of crushing bricks. The bricks were tough – baked and hard. It went on for a little while. “… All right,” Ashi crushed out at last. “All right, Yams. You’ve got it. Gods above, I’ll rue this; but I can’t argue against that. I won’t deny you base revenge. I’m no hypocrite.” She spat a ball of venom and surrender at the nearest clump of roses. “I’ll rile up the girls,” she said, set and grim. “When do you want us go-able?”

Yamame’s brows bunched up. “… What?”

Ashi spat again. “I don’t like it,” she growled; “I don’t bleeding like it, and I’m still spooked about the whole thing; but, Yams – that doesn’t mean I’m not with you. You’re my sister. I respect you. I _love_ you. All of us love you. You were attacked; _we all_ want whoever did this to you lashed up and left out to dry. That we’re also a _tittle-little_ unnerved is just my footnote. What’s that in Yamame terms? It’s the talc-dust on the new sills. Annoying, but I won’t spank the site manager about it.”

The elder spider rethreaded her frown into an affectionate smile. “I wouldn’t spank you if you did that, you know.”

“No. You’d shoo us home, then stay behind and mop it clean all by yourself. All said, you’re awfully selfish; did you know that, sister? There are times when we _want_ to help you – even if the clean-up sucks.” The younger spider smirked. “Just times, though. So don’t take it too close to heart.”

The smile on Yamame’s face warmed up even more. “Thank you, Ashi.”

“I’m your sister, Yams,” Ashi, shrugging, reminded. “You’ll have less argument from me than some others, I dare imagine.”

At that reminder, the two earth spiders rounded on the quietest peak of their plotting triangle.

The human Paran – who had been plotting in his own human mind and at his own human pace – met their tense expectation with a blank human stare.

“… Uh,” he grunted his assent.

Or had it been assent? Ashi spoke over it ahead Yamame might line the mystery out.

“Well, dull man?” demanded the younger spider. “Not going to put your foot down? Threaten to lock up the larder? Not that it’d do much for it, looking like it does now.”

Paran, spooling in his previous thoughts, slowly strung his eyes from the pushy young spinstress to her calmly waiting sibling. The eyes caught on Yamame’s own amber set. They held it – long enough to stall the elder spider’s next breath. Then, Paran wheezed his resignation.

“… Could you be stopped?” he asked, in fluent rhetorical.

Yamame exhaled. She gave her human a smile – a grateful apology. “… No,” she told him. “Not for long, anyway. It was my house. I’d lived in it for ages. I owe it action – my action. Not some bossy shrine maiden’s.”

Her beloved human gave up a nod. His shoulders – those wide, steady shoulders – unwound from a useless rise. “Then,” he sighed, “I shouldn’t tax my foot. That, and—” he glanced challengingly at the younger earth spider, “… Same here. I love you. I won’t stand in your way.”

Yamame’s cheeks bloomed cherry-red at her human’s casual use of their private, three-word spell in front of another – a spider to boot; but, infuriatingly, Ashi’s carmine eyes betrayed no magickal effect. Only the softest of surprises – chased by a hem of sisterly relief.

“… Some things have finally been let out, I see,” said Ashi. A clipped scoff popped between her colourless lips when the human vouchsafed no response but for a lift of his arms and a slight spread of his hands. “Oh, you poor, dull man,” Hachiashi booed. “Now you’re trapped in earnest! And it took you but, what – the better half of a year? You poor, dull, slow-witted, masochistic man. Yams, sister mine, please – do tell me you didn’t crack his ribs when he told you. As I know him, he might be swooning from pain in secret even now.”

Yamame’s mouth warped into a pout. “… Am I the only one who wasn’t told?”

Hachiashi laughed – loudly, but without rancour. “No, Yams. Not by a long stitch. But you never got him drunk. And a drunk man, dear sister, will tell you just about anything. No Komeiji devilry required.”

The elder spider peered up sadly at her human. Paran managed to detect the accusation – and dimly smiled it down. Yamame, irritating at how easily she forgave him, faced again her devious sister. “And you?” she puffed. “What about yours? Hmm? What about _your_ men?”

Ashi’s amusement jelled into a guarded stare. “… What-ever do you mean?”

“On the last night of our project,” explained Yamame, “the one just last week – while your sisters were wrecking Hijiri’s new floors, you put on your best dress and snuck out to drink with a different company. I saw you, Ashi; I saw the company, as well. I was there.”

“In _the Human Village?_ ” Hachiashi gasped, mock-outraged. “Yams, dearie me, isn’t that forbidden? Weren’t we, cast-out of the Underworld, by rights disallowed from the village bounds? What would your Oni buddies say?”

“I was let in. I had an escort.”

“So did I,” Ashi shot back. “At least _later_ that night.” She folded her sweat-shiny arms at her chest. “Yes, dear sister; I was there, dress, different company and all. So what? I wasn’t caught, and I bothered no one. My own escort even volunteered his own place when the rest of our company turned out too many cups. Imagine that. He was very nice – even when I hinted at what I actually was. Only asked that I was _gentle_. Why, he even kissed me good-bye when we parted, early in the morning. Kisses are nice, aren’t they, Yams? You would know.”

The bubbling skin of jealousy over her sister’s words cautioned Yamame to keep her prodding shallow. “… Are you going to _keep_ sneaking out, then?” the elder spinstress asked instead. “I’m not condemning you, Ashi; I’m asking – because I’m more or less dependent on you to keep tabs on our own. If you’re _going to_ … well, I’d like to be let know beforehand. That’s all.”

Ashi’s eyes went wide. “And why would I want to do that, now?” The younger earth spider enjoyed the baffled needlework of her elder sister’s brows. Then, mercifully, she shook her head. “No, Yams,” she obliged. “You assumed again. I’m not going to keep sneaking out. I don’t see why I would. I’m not you. I don’t have your capacity for dedication. Truth be said, I’m plenty satisfied where I am. I had fun; I got an itch scratched; I got a kiss into the bargain. More importantly, I _proved_ something to myself. This is all that matters. There is nothing else that does more. So no, sister—” Ashi wiped her arms down, “—I’m not going anywhere. I won’t lie – the day I lie to you is the day the Sun falls from the sky – if we ever work nearby the Human Village again, then I might look him up for one more night. But I’m not about to build a house and move in together. I just can’t summon up that kind of care. That’s you, Yams. You can. And we both know you’re more puissant than all of us boiled together. Let alone little me.”

Against the lump of irritation lodged in her stomach – both at her sister’s duplicity and, hypocritically, the bull-headed denial of her own strengths – Yamame Kurodani, the eldest among the earth spiders, squeezed out an age-appropriate smile. The old sentiment, _I will never get a measure of this one,_ layered up yet again – like old dye after washing.

Might be, measuring second-best, Hachiashi, had always been a foolish effort. Might be, the thin, jet-haired spider recognised measuring tapes were coiled likes snakes in every grass-patch of conversation, and probed ahead with a stout, sarcasm-sharp pole. Why the true sizes of Hachiashi were somehow something to be avoided remained a pricklier question… but, this as well might never be measured – less…

… _Less,_ Yamame amused, someone opened up the young spider’s heart, and took a look at the grassroots.

“Are you reeeally sure,” she asked, beaming innocence, “that you don’t want to come in? We’ve got cake.”

Ashi, ever-probing Ashi, faked a concerned shake of her head. “And break the lady of the house over my knee? No, Yams; I’ve met her offspring. She would cry, and she has the voice of a _yamabiko_ … if the _yamabiko_ had a bloody trumpet to boot. Tell me when you want us to go, so I can get scarce. I want out of this bloody place. I’m swimming in my clothes.”

“It has some visual merit,” Paran chipped in.

Hachiashi gave him a startled look. “ _Yams,_ ” she hissed at her sister with unaffected alarm, “grab this lout and hold him! I think he wants to kiss me.”

* * *

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow, it was resolved, the spiders would mount their hunt.

No sooner had the resolve been cast than Hachiashi, slipping nimbly below the human’s attempt at a handshake, issued her final commentary on Satori Komeiji’s home (it was bloody), and flew. The eldest of the earth spiders, Yamame Kurodani, span around on an anxious heel; and, her beloved human silently following, she returned indoors, back to Lady Satori’s close environs. Because there was nothing to say, they said no more nor less; Satori Komeiji did, anyway, and made it up for them plentifully once they had re-entered the dining hall.

Because nothing could be hidden long from Satori Komeiji, Yamame allowed her mind to loop around the talk she’d had with her less moderate sister. But, if the dread mind-reader found being so accommodated… well, _anything_ – she did not show, or say.

A detached, “… I see,” was the only reply. And the tiny vicereine sipped away at her (where had it come from?) morning coffee.

The mother of plagues, Yamame Kurodani, narrowed her spider’s eyes at the inscrutable woman. “… No censure?” she asked. “No objections? No ‘This won’t do’s? I can do what I want?”

Lady Satori exhaled into her cup. “Why?” she returned. “Think, Yamame. It’s no skin off my teeth. As a matter of fact, assuming that your sister has told it right, and that which has attacked you retreated to the surface when pursued… That would make it a fair assumption it had sensed its safety there. That, figuring further, it had _come from there._ This warrants retaliation, in my view. Moreover,” she added, a smile crept out over her staid expression, “if it spares me having to come up with an apt punishment, as I’d have had to if it had been one of us… all the happier I.”

“And you’re not worried about—”

“If,” Satori interrupted, “If she comes down here, Yamame,” she said, “if she sees it as a violation of our treaties, I’ll _revel_ in telling her all about how you were attacked first. How you were acting in self-defence. How _her side_ had failed in taking steps. The Hakurei and I have had disagreements before. I’ll be delighted to test how rusty I’ve gotten at grinding her nose down to size – if any.”

Yamame hung her arms. “… The Hakurei?” she asked, disbelieving.

“She’s only human,” reminded Satori. “Most of the time, anyway. I’ll take her on. As a matter of fact, I owe you this much. As your _counsel._ ”

Though the word had smacked of some small, unspoken offence, Yamame Kurodani gave all the same a consenting nod. “… All right,” she said. “Very—”

“—Good,” finished Satori. “Yes, yes. All in a day’s work. Now, please, finish your breakfast. Orin was about to while you were gone, and I really would not much enjoy her getting any heavier than she is. She likes to sneak in our bed and lie atop the most delicate body parts.”

In the adjacent chair, Kaenbyou Rin perked her chin haughtily. “Orin lies where it is comfortable,” she-cat declared. “She discriminates not.”

Lady Satori, chuckling, reached out to rub one of the cat-maid’s ears. “How noble,” she praised. “But, still, no _third_ dessert for you. Yours and mine were enough, I think.”

Orin gave a token moan… then resumed swishing her tails pleasantly as her ears were loved.

The remainder of that day paced by on unexcited feet.

After their meal (and dessert – one a piece), the men had fled the grand dining hall of _Chirei-den_ – to the kitchen first, then, on Paran’s sudden request, to relight their study of Garion’s maps in the mansion’s shadowed library. As they had, so too had Lady Satori and Yamame set about a previous day’s idea to pass the time. The two Underworld _youkai_ came by, and collected from the mind-reader’s chambers the old sewing kit and some of the less desirable of the abandoned dresses; then, less leisurely with the wonderful potentials lading the earth spider’s arms and thoughts, they made their quiet way to the cosy little room Yamame had, across the lately days, fashioned into her nest. Orin had gone alone – off to some unutterable task Old Hell had commanded, even of Satori Komeiji’s pets.

Awhile, as Yamame sewed and re-sewed, Lady Satori sat, idly speculating on, deriding, and then – whimsically – excusing the dresses’ original wearers. A while later, and she recounted at laugh-scored length the first encounter of the Underworld’s worst with the newest Komeiji in their midst. One later still and she only watched, unspeaking – at once resentful and entranced by Yamame’s single-threaded devotion to her work.

Afterwards, the men came, and whisked them away (Yamame with some difficulty) for dinner.

An evening (of a sort) stole over the Palace of Earth Spirits, counted only by the internal clocks of its occupants. Lady Satori had taken her husband and retired to her chambers, leaving the earth spider in her room with her sewing and her human. The human required no attention, contented rifling through the room’s bookcase. The sewing, anyway, arrested everything.

At least, until it was disputed _directly._

She felt, more than heard, Paran’s hands alight on the backrest of the chair where she was seated. Her own hands continued in their flickering motions, even as her human squinted down on them from above. A few more stitches, and his curiosity spilled over.

“… Is this hard?” he wanted to know.

Yamame, craning her neck, gave him a teasing smile. “Thinking of picking it up?”

Paran made a derisive sound. “With these?” He rapped his (admittedly thick) fingers on the chair’s boards. “Not likely. I’ve never seen you sew before. That’s why I ask.”

“You haven’t?”

Her human shifted his stance. “… Not that I recall,” he said. “I’ve seen you draft, sure; but sewing… Might have been bad timing. Whenever I got you an assignment, you sat down to draw; whenever you were finished, and free, I went out again. Usually.”

“Mhm.” Yamame nodded. “That sounds about right.”

“So, I never actually saw you sew.” He paused. Then, his brows curled. “… You’re quick.”

“It’s…” Yamame hesitated (but not her fingers); “It’s a knack,” she decided. “I don’t really _think_ on it much. When I do it, it just… happens. My right hand works; my left hand knows where it’s about to go, so it’s already there when it’s needed – and inversely. It all flows together. I probably couldn’t do it anymore if I stopped and thought it through.”

“Mm.” Paran made a non-committal murmur.

He snaked his hands down from the backrest of her chair… and wrapped them around Yamame’s shoulders.

She felt her heart judder with rogue excitement.

The yearly malady, Yamame Kurodani, knew – even as she wrested a silly grin – only half of it had been for he had _dared._ Paran of the previous weeks would never have made so bold as to compete for attention with her hobbies; now, it seemed, the hobbies were not so daunting anymore. His newfound courage appealed to her. It stroked the same part of her mentality which had forgiven him each time he had caused her embarrassment in front of others. It annoyed the earth spider at her core – goaded it, galled it – but this only painted him more attractive in the end. More _male._ More exciting.

The other half… was not so clean.

Her human had said it himself: being near her was a potent poison. It dumbed him. It eroded his restraints. It had unravelled the oaths he had given to himself, and had seen him confess love to a loathed _youkai_. It had dissolved the dams he had raised from sodden, uncooperative ground, and drowned him in a flood of his own desires.

But still, here he was. On his own accord, by his own will, he had approached the spider. Against the illogic, the better judgement, he had thrown himself into her web. He drank the poison, stopper, bottle and all.

He was giving in. And that satisfied her on another, even stickier level.

The eldest of the Underworld’s earth spiders, Yamame Kurodani, felt the hands slither down the gap of her collar and squeeze down on the unshielded skin of her shoulders. Her fingers slowed; her focus spoiled. Her human’s hands squeezed again. Again. And again.

Agonisingly, Yamame put down her needle and scraps. She tugged open the top buttons of her undershirt, the better to admit those impudent hands. She arched her back, and pouted up at the bold human who would have her undress for him.

Paran leaned down and kissed her.

She did not quite know when she reached up to him, nor how it was he lifted her out of the chair without a hitch of awkwardness. She knew she laughed when he dropped her almost casually on the bed. She stopped when he crawled over her and pinned her arms to the mattress above her head. She made a little show of resistance when he began to dig his unemployed hand under her back to unhook her bra – but quit it ahead he might thread a wrong idea. She loosed her muscles and let him take what he wanted.

She would take hers, later.

When she fell asleep, hours afterwards, she was fulfilled – buried up to her nose in his arms, awash in his smell, and full of his love.

When she woke the next morning, she was cold and alone.

* * *


	36. The man

At first, she thought it little anything. A loose snag. A mild annoyance of the night’s perfect order. An excuse to tease later.

Yamame Kurodani, earth spider though she was, was not sewn entirely of selfish cloth. She knew her beloved human had needs. She remembered his gross incompatibility with the mansion’s dry air. As like, he was chugging from a faucet in the washroom nearby; he was taking longer, perhaps, because he was fetching a cup for Yamame as well. Might be, an even later wish stitched itself out of idle threads, that he was ferrying foods from the kitchen – to serve his lover in bed, out of the cast of their hosts’ over-numerous eyes. Might be, Yamame theorised as minutes swam emptily by, it would be a breakfast of two courses. Or three. Or five – with dessert.

But still, Paran was not coming back.

Yamame Kurodani, throwing off the warm covers, rolled to the edge of the bed, and up onto her feet. Stomach fluttering (and not from hunger), she collected her discarded underwear and tugged it back on. Her dress – the earthen, common one, which she had over the evenings repaired from its damage in the acidic ruins of her house – was slung across the room’s lone chair. The spinstress shoved herself into the familiar fabrics. The accustomed touch – and smell – were safe and domestic; and her bristled nerves were, momentarily, patted down.

They rose again soon enough.

Paran was not in the washroom. Nor in the intervening corridors when she checked; nor was he drudging at Satori Komeiji’s table in the mansion’s grand dining hall. No one was, _as a matter of fact_ ; and Yamame, her paces more and more clipped with each Paran-less minute passed, wandered around for a time… Until, nails jabbing into the pads of her palms, she was belatedly reminded she had never been shown where the mansion’s one active kitchen was sited.

She stood, immobile and lost, in _Chirei-den’s_ one still passage among a thousand likewise. And no humans in sight.

In the end, the course had been picked for her. No one knew as well what transpired inside the so-called Palace as its frumpy-haired queen; and Yamame, crushing out the poisonous thought, turned back to retrace her random, frantic steps. She found once more the one hall (among a thousand) which her spider’s eyes recognised; and then – a skip short of a run by now – she plotted the way for Satori Komeiji’s private chambers.

The tiny vicereine would have some things to answer. Yamame hoped, for her sake, that she would not have a lot to answer _for._

* * *

The eldest of her name, Old Hell’s jury and judge, she whom vengeful spirits feared and despised, Satori Komeiji, was planted at her odd, wickerwork table, busying her lips with a cup of oily-smelling coffee.

Had she not been _what_ she was, Yamame may never have registered the minute differences Satori had affected when the door of her bedroom had been rammed aside to permit in an earth spider at hunt. She may never have recognised the adjusted fix of Lady Satori’s spine – the tightened set of her shoulders – the heartbeat tremor of fingers looped around precious porcelain. A mind that was not hers may have associated these with anything else; but to Yamame’s eight-eyed sensibilities, these were the hallmarks of prey. Startled. Caught. The flexing – a survival instinct meant to make the predator hesitate. A last-ditch throw. Useless, flimsy posturing.

All of this stitched through the padding of Yamame’s mind – through an underlayer so base, the eldest Komeiji could not see it. There was but one conscious, processed thought inside the earth spider’s oven-hot skull. It was big, dark-eyed, and human. And it was gone.

Yamame sucked the air of Satori Komeiji’s bedroom in through clamped teeth to speak her demands.

The dread mind-reader proved quicker, for once.

“I know,” she said. “I know, Yamame. Calm down. I know… and I have known. It’s my job to do that,” she added. The humour was stale before it had poured fully out. Lady Satori set her fragrant cup down. “… Calm down, Yamame,” she implored. “Nothing good will come of spitting poison. I will tell you what you want to hear. As a matter of fact, I’d been expecting you to come by… more or less.”

In no mood for approximations, Yamame slid her fangs out with an unspoken threat. She re-sheathed them very soon, remembering who the diminutive creature hunched at the table was… but her gums itched on. She swallowed the acrid taste of submission down together with toxin-tinged saliva.

“… Where?” she squeezed out.

Satori Komeiji nodded her chin vaguely toward the ceiling. “There,” she said. “To the surface.”

Yamame was running out of understanding. “Why?”

“Because he _wanted to_ ,” the mind-reader replied. “Because he needed to, more pertinently. Because there are things he does not want you to face – or have to face. Because that is where one of those things is presently… as far as we gathered.”

“What things?” growled the spider. “Where?”

Satori Komeiji, vicereine of Old Hell, issued a long, self-incriminating sigh. “… This, Yamame,” she said at length, “I will not tell you.”

It took the best of _who_ she was, not to tear the small woman out of her chair. It took all of the discoveries she had lately made of herself to curb the upbringing which she had soaked among the Oni of the Capital. It took Yamame Kurodani, the pretty idiot, to grab the mother of plagues and hold her down.

A quieter, more distant Yamame – crouched in a dusty corner of her head – realised these were mostly silly, emotional reflexes. But she was too worried, too afraid for her human to stand and speak up.

Lady Satori – damn her – saw all of this flash-burn behind Yamame’s eyes. The small governess draped an expression over her face that might have been diplomatic – were the circumstance otherwise, and Yamame not intractable.

“I will not tell you,” she began to explain, “because I cannot tell you. Because, regardless of _what_ I am, Yamame, I can very well observe respect. I can keep a promise. And your human – your ‘Paran’ – has requested that I do not tell you.”

Yamame blinked. “He _requested_ you?” she repeated. “He?”

“Not—” Satori smiled fractionally, “—at first, I suppose. At first, he had attempted to keep me out. His methods were studied, I’ll grant him; but I am, as you say, the eldest of my name. I have picked up tricks, learned to force some locks. As a matter of fact, I’ve had to – which is a story for any other day. So, when prevention had ultimately failed your lover, he requested instead. Needlessly, might I say – because I’d long extracted that particular secret; but he was serious and honest. And that, Yamame, you should have felt by now, I can respect.”

Yamame’s head tossed left and right. “It doesn’t matter,” she snapped. “It _doesn’t_ matter! He can’t go to the surface. He’s never been here; he hasn’t walked these tunnels. He can’t fly. He must be close still. He must—”

“Yamame.” Lady Satori _tsk_ ed. “Will you stop and _think?_ With _intelligence?_ Never mind he has been poring over maps off and on these past few days. Never mind he is enough hot-blooded to brave the trail on his own. There is one in this house who is acquainted intimately with these parts of the Underworld. The walkable parts especially. He could have guided your lover.”

“And he did?” Yamame’s voice stalked a register close to a warning hiss.

“And he did,” sighed Satori. “You must agree, Yamame. It was the safer path.”

“And you let them go?”

“As a matter of fact,” Lady Satori said, sadly, “I had little aught to say about it once Garion got roped in. See, Yamame, men… Men interact along a certain system. They call it _honour_. It edges closer to _pride,_ if you ask me – _keeping level_ if we had to invent an unoffending term; but, the crux of it is, when Garion heard your lover was embarked on something momentous, even dangerous… He was _honour-bound_ to lend his relevant wisdoms. I really had little foundation for debate then. They went, and that was the long and the short of it.”

A few furious heartbeats yet, Yamame stood with her teeth gnashed and her fists clenched so tight as to become white. A few more still, and her fear, her anger, confusion and concern for her only human began to meld together under her spider’s heart. They coiled, squeezed, smushed together like a ball of resin mixed with saw-dust – growing harder and blacker by the moment.

It took but one another for the threads holding it up to _snap_ … and the new emotion dropped, vertiginously, down into the pit of her stomach.

The emotion had a name. Yamame was too suddenly light-headed to work out the syllables.

“… Why?” she asked. Her question was almost plaintive. She trembled. “Why? You could have stopped them. You could have held them up. You could have told me. That thing… It _ate_ my home. It scared my sisters. And we’re earth spiders. Why did you let him – a human – come at it alone?”

The answer was a sad, resigned prophecy. Lady Satori, gripping her cup by the handle, peered intensely into the black contents – as if reeling something up from a dark, secreted memory.

“… Because, Yamame,” she said at last, “some demons must be faced by their authors.”

 _All riddles,_ Yamame thought hatefully. _All riddles, lies, all the time. I’ve had enough. Of this. Of you._

The tar-slough weight that had been crushing her insides now exploded into viscera of action. Yamame spindled round on the balls of her feet, and all but clawed across the room for the door.

At its step, Satori Komeiji’s voice halted her for a few more desperate seconds.

“Yamame.” Lady Satori was talking fast. “If you run into Garion, please – don’t hurt him. He is only doing what he thinks is expected. So, please…”

“… I won’t,” Yamame snarled. _I’m not one of your pets. I’m not an animal, curse you._

“Good.” Satori shut her two upper eyes. “Good… Yamame?”

“ _What?_ ” snapped the spinstress.

The dread mind-reader, Satori Komeiji, wavered with her answer. She hugged her cup and stared shameful holes into the wicker of the table.

At last, she looked up – and murmured her final appeal.

“… I will always be here,” she said. “I have always been and will likely be. If, by any time, you will find it in yourself to forgive me—”

The earth spider slammed the door.

Alone now, ballpeen-hammer need driving movement into her limbs, Yamame Kurodani ripped across _Chirei-den_ ’s wide, unpopulated halls, down a treaded spoor which led to the mansion’s front entrance.

A dry, unfeeling, _delicious_ thought intruded itself, that she should tear the walls down instead. That she ought to blast the mansion’s roof clean off, the quicker to be quit of the accursed place. That a _betrayer’s_ home deserved, anyway, no tidier fate than her own.

Only a clinging scrap of tact, of consideration – for the house’s architect, not the owner – stayed her rankling hands.

Yamame made for the damned front door.

* * *

The Underworld’s vents spewed her out like volcanic ejecta into Gensokyo’s dawning sky. She whirled – splayed out her arms and legs – and broke the flight with her mind as well as the resisting air. The earth spider hung – on invisible, arcane strings – high over the waking forests of the Goddesses’ Mount.

Yamame had not been apprised of which outlet the humans had taken, and that was critical. Her eyes batted in a web-spoke pattern between the damp forest roof below and the varying reference points on the horizon. She whipped about – four times, six, eight…

… And then, she won her prize.

Toward the sunrise, on the eastern side of the mountain, a _disruption_ was climbing for the sky. A shimmer of miscoloured air. A billow of effluvia, some sick pollution, swelling above the trees. Yamame braced. Then, boosting, she sped in a powerful arc for the disturbance… and the road, which her instincts told her – unsurprised – terminated in the unseen entrance of her home.

And there, rending the woven canopy of the forest, was an ugly stain. It spread out and tore the fabric of the woodland, eating up the multitude of colours and ejecting them as an ill, greenish brown. It was a wound in the landscape. A pool of deceased, putrid plant-matter – wasted and spoiled like the eye of an old fish, landed and left out to rot in the Sun. The rank stench of unbridled, rampant decay nigh on knocked the earth spider out of the air.

But this was not the prize.

The still, four-limbed figure, lying in the dust of the road some distance from the rotted pool, was.

Yamame Kurodani, half a hundred warning bells pealing out and splitting in her head, dismissed her spell. The spider spinstress careered for the ground – gravity and need dragging her down with equal force. She punched into the forest floor, a humanoid meteor, only her _youkai_ core sparing her from becoming a vile stain herself. She blew out of her landing site – swatting aside the flying brush – and scrambled for the mountain path ahead. For the human who lay face-down in its middle.

For Paran.

She was, she realised when her lungs squeezed in pain, crying out his name. She foundered to her knees at his side and, wringing out her fear, rolled him onto his back. His face was pale, sickly… but his lips popped ajar, and out issued a wheezing breath. Yamame had to clamp her jaw to contain the sudden, idiot desire to kiss him. She hiked up his shoulders. Called his name. Shook him. Called again. Shook.

And then, miracle of miracles, her human lurched… and his precious eyes wrested open.

The dull, sardonic look he gave her was so familiar – so routine – all but it wrenched her overworked heart out.

“… Hello,” he said.

And nothing else.

Yamame collapsed into a weak, hiccupping laugh.

Paran let her laugh. He let her tumid emotions bleed themselves dry. He let her hook his shoulders under and drag him off the road to prop him against the trunk of a nearby tree. He let her hands slide up and down senselessly over his front. He stared her worried searching down.

“… I am fine,” he rasped. “Quit pawing. I’m… fine.”

“A fine person,” Yamame argued, “doesn’t plop down to sleep in the middle of a road. Are you hurting anywhere? Anywhere feels numb? Wrong?”

“… Hurts to breathe a bit,” Paran confessed. “No big wonder… Must have puked for near on half an hour. Head feels… woozy. Throat burns.” He forced a flat, insincere smile. “I didn’t notice I’d conked out. What time is it?”

The spinstress had no head for repartee. “What were you _thinking?_ ” she questioned instead. “Why didn’t you tell me anything? Why did you run off? This… is so far outside your web it isn’t even the same cave anymore. Why? What were you going to do?”

Her human – her beloved, irreplaceable human – sucked his teeth. His eyes, misting, darted sideways – down the road, toward the noxious rent in the forest. He returned them, just as soon, to her… empty of excuses.

“I thought—” he began – before truth told otherwise, and his voice was smothered. “… I wanted—” he tried anew – but want had not been in his choices’ lining that day. “… I _needed,_ ” he admitted at last, “I needed to… To speak. To him. To make him stop.”

Yamame frowned. “To whom? Make who stop?”

Paran’s mouth tightened, as if he had blurted a lie without meaning. “… Yamame,” he croaked, urgently, “please. Let me—”

The earth spider gripped him by the wrists. They were limp. Cold. “No,” she said. “No. I won’t. I’ll carry you if I must; but you aren’t staying. You aren’t fine. You’re white as paper… You’re stammering. You’ve never stammered.”

“Yamame—”

“I’m _getting you out,_ ” she overrode him. “I’m taking you to your town. To see a… a _physician_. A doctor. I can control diseases – not poison. This – whatever this is – can be dealt with later. My sisters are waiting on me; I will come around with them. We’ll sort out whatever… whoever this is, together. You need help. You can’t wait here. You must—”

“ _I must talk,_ ” her human wheezed at her, “… to him. This is my fault. Mine. I’ve made… this mistake, before.” He exhaled with difficulty. “I’ve repaired that one… I think. Let me repair this. At least, let me try. _Yamame._ ”

Yamame Kurodani was an earth spider. The eldest, most mighty – the mother of plagues. She was not, unlike some, _honour-bound_ to comply. What was there to make her? No _youkai’s_ instinct obliged her to listen. No spider’s sensibility reared to contest her wish to move her human to safety first, then to give chase to the enemy. She could seize him now, willing or no, and fly – ahead the slightest objection might mount.

… But she had learned some things across the month, had the old mother of plagues – and listening had been among the least obscure.

In the end, she could not say which had kept her feet aground. Her neighbourliness, or her tight-laced diligence? The _pressure_ in her human’s voice? The askance parallel to his past missteps? At the eyelet end of the minute, Yamame Kurodani, the yearly malady, did not know. She released the hold on her human’s arms… and gave up a slow, un-spidery nod.

“… All right,” she said. She did not sound quite all right, so she said it again. “All right. Very good… I will help you try.”

Paran stared up at her unhappy face. Surprise and gratitude vied for majority in the space behind his eyes. Neither had won; but Yamame’s human must have felt it meet he voice _some_ result.

“… I love you,” he said stupidly.

That pinched her cheeks in a grin. “I know,” she replied (no less stupidly). “I know you do. I’ve been told. What I don’t know is what you want to do. What you require _me_ to do.”

Paran set his mind. His eyes followed. “… I must go,” he said, “in there. Tell him. That things have moved on. That you aren’t who… what he has known you to be.”

“Who is this diabolical ‘he’ we keep bringing up?”

Her human’s face squelched, mossing over with chagrin. “… A lie,” he hissed. “A mistake. Something that should never have been. Never needed. That I kept using.”

 _This means nothing of use to me,_ Yamame complained inside. “Haven’t you tried once, already? To go in there?”

“… Suppose,” groaned Paran, “Suppose I have. I didn’t make… good headway. Couldn’t breathe past thirty paces. Scrambled back. Got winded. Swallowed too much of… of those fumes.”

“And then passed out,” Yamame finished, tartly, “in an uncomfortable place. Had a long nap. Worried an earth spider bald.”

Paran graced her jabs with a guilty smile. “… Suppose I have.”

“How do you suppose to reach whoever it is you need to talk down?”

“I—” Her human hesitated. “… Can’t see how.”

“You ran all the way,” Yamame exasperated, “ _all the way_ out here from Komeiji’s hole. You snuck out of bed – that had me in it. You hired on a twice-damned guide. So you were fixed in your rush to come out here, you forgot to bring along your blindfold. And now, you say you… _can’t see_ what to do?” The spinstress made a critical sound. “Sloppy, Paran. Sloppy.”

“I hadn’t planned—” gasped her human, “I hadn’t planned for… for this. Any of this. I hadn’t planned on…”

 _You hadn’t planned on a lot of things,_ thought Yamame. _But here we are._

“… I will go,” she told him.

Paran stared.

The earth spider stitched out a resolute expression. “I will go,” she announced, “in there. Into that stinking pool. I will find whatever precious acquaintance of yours has caused this. I’ll rope them – and drag them out here. And then, after you’ve forged out whatever it is you need them to hear, I will rope you – and fly you to your town. No arguments, no delays. No detours. You talk, then we fly. Very good, Paran?”

The human in front of her – the thoughtless, beloved human – stared on for a few heartbeats yet. They were short, diseased heartbeats. Paran opened his mouth to speak.

“Very goo—”

Yamame _moved,_ snatching the words out mid-syllable. No longer willing – able – to compress her emotions inside, she closed in on her knees… and, longingly, pushed her lips onto his.

As the rest of him, they were cool. Somewhere, in a less coherent part of her spider’s brain, Yamame yearned foolishly to warm them up. She bounced back to her feet ahead the idea might leak and waterlog the rest of her thoughts.

She squared her back, looking out to the toxic mire beyond the trees. The stench of rot, of hyper-accelerated decay, chemically-spurred decomposition, was wafting in on a febrile wind.

“… Yamame?” Paran called behind her.

The spider stiffened at the tone of his voice. “… What?”

“… This,” her human grated out, “all of this… This is my fault. Not yours.”

“So?” asked Yamame.

“So,” replied Paran, “whatever he says, remember… You are not to blame. Not for this. Not for anything. Never were. Yamame Kurodani,” he wheezed, “… has done _no wrong._ ”

Yamame vised her teeth.

She began to walk – before either of them might recall how false that statement had been shown last time.

* * *

She passed the first thirty paces, which had debilitated her human, with no greater obstruction. From there on, it only got worse.

As she neared on the shore of the poisoned pool, the thick, spoiled air closed in on her skin and clotted on her tongue. The soil shifted into _mush_ – a confused, glutinous mess of half-digested cellulose, starch and ground minerals. Around, trees leaned precariously; some, mostly younger specimen, were losing their coats of leaves before her watching eyes in a rapid, chemically-fooled hibernation. The soles of the spider’s shoes _smack_ ed and _slurp_ ed obscenely as they pulled free of the yielding terrain. The sloping-over reek of corrupt, dying nature pressed in on her _youkai_ ’s senses – forcing them to shut down, layer by layer, to keep her physiology from purging itself in a flight of preservative panic. Her stomach wrung.

As the crippled trees gave way to open space, another sick sensation wriggled into the hind of her brain. A dizziness. A kind of mental vertigo that grew nauseatingly in intensity as she gazed out over the focus of the devastation.

The sight _heeled_ before her; it slipped between the sticky threads of her mind – like an over-clever insect bypassing her mental net. All at once Yamame Kurodani understood what it was Hachiashi had meant when she had described their encounter with the unknown assailant. What Nikiba had felt when she had almost touched it. The fashion in which it had escaped them.

But Yamame Kurodani was the mother of plagues. She was the eldest of the Underworld’s earth spiders. She strained the hooks of her internal web. She tightened the strings. Attuned them to the slightest vibration. The merest hint of presence. The dimmest sight.

And it was then, she saw.

In the middle of the opening, a lone human figure was slumped.

A human, its legs folded underneath, knelt in the digestive bog which bubbled and pooled around it on all sides. Its head, dripping knotted, greasy hair, was thrown back, sobbing in silent, inexpressible despair. Its hands clutched at its face – scratching, spasming in synchrony with its private pain. Its eyes were unseeable – hidden beneath a strip of midnight-black cloth, wound round and round its skull to deny the painful, morning light. A cloak of rags – long, impossibly white – hung from its sagged shoulders.

Yamame reeled. Her mental web snapped.

In the middle of the stinking pool… sat Paran.

* * *


	37. The lie

Gingerly, the spider slid out of her shoes, socks… and stepped into the pool.

A spasm of pain, warning, knifed up the meat of her calves. Corrosive, gluttonous acids sank their chemical hooks into her skin, seeking purchase, prying wide the passage for virulent, invasive toxins. They bit into her flesh, spearing, cutting… and found themselves utterly repelled.

The earth spider’s biology burned the poisons away into hissing smoke. Her magickally-sustained tissues mended and revitalised ahead her blood was fouled. Caustic, ravenous compounds which would have liquefied her footwear were no more adverse to her body than a prankster’s bucket of ice-water. Yamame Kurodani waded in, half up to her knees in the digestive soup – acquainted with the first step, knowing in the second, impervious by the third. The mother of plagues would not be struck low by her own species’ art.

_Her own species…_

The thought jarred her attention from the kneeling Paran-thing and swept her eyes lengthwise the desolated forest. A bolus of indignation, scalding and bitter, rolled up from her abdomen.

This… was no spider’s doing. It had no punctiliousness, no finesse, none of the needle-point function which contained the spiders’ work. The venoms and gastric acids were spewed about, any-old-how, over nothing to be eaten – nothing to drive off – for no ready purpose but this was what spiders were said to do. It was the act of something which knew of the Underworld’s builders – but not their inner lining. An architect-pseud, drafting up a house with all the walls, windows, doors and a roof outward, but no supports or partitions within.

It was an _imitation._ Unthinking, misguided… and disastrous.

She shivered off the interfering thoughts and trained her eyes once more on the thing that had done it all.

The thing, in defiance of its familiar silhouette, was a headache to keep in focus. It skimmed. It skipped. It slicked her natural senses and glided past, like a dream-moth blending in with surrounding reality. It bled light through its outline. As if it did not _want_ to be seen. As if Yamame, like the rest of her spider sisters, had never _been meant_ to see it.

But she was _what_ she was, whatever the thrice-damned Komeiji had fancied; and she poured her _youkai_ ’s mind forward at the blurring shape, until the likeness of her human lover was fully resolved.

She recognised, with a tug of disgust, that the Paran-thing was not _wearing_ a blindfold. The blackened stripe bisecting its face was not fabric, but discoloured flesh. A patch of scorched (or diseased) skin circling its skull in a sick counterfeit of cloth. Another imitation. Another lie. What _else_ was fake?

The ground beneath the surface of the necrotic slurry was not; and Yamame, her main focus elsewhere, suddenly rammed a toe into something indigestible jutting out of the forest floor.

She cried out. Not from pain, but, startled, out of sheer surprise. Her brain unscrambled after a heartbeat, calming down. Then, it grasped what she had done.

Ahead of her, the false Paran _stabbed_ into definition.

The crying sheared off; the wordless despair – killed in a flash. The imitation blazed bright with painful, toxic colour. The hands, which had been clutching its marred face, flaked uselessly onto its lap. The two eyes entombed in the black, “blindfold” flesh sliced open. Its head cracked into a wary, forward position.

It gazed _directly past_ Yamame.

The earth spider stood, transfixed by her own tension and the milk-rot white of the imitation’s eyes. It was as its head was cocked in childlike confusion, and the eyes never centred, that something else caught in Yamame’s web of awareness.

The Paran-thing was _blind._

“… Naoto?”

The sound of the voice – the timbre, inflection – was so, so close to her heart. All but, and the spinstress would have whipped about on her naked heels to see whether her beloved human had followed her into the poisoned glade after all. But, no. Paran could not have done that. Not without a risk. Not without irreversibly damaging his health – never mind her trust.

What _had_ spoken was the fake – the false Paran – now poised alertly on its haunches. It raised its scarred face – to reveal it somewhat younger than the one she knew by heart. Not so distant as to seem changed… but enough to make her briefly remember mortality.

“… Naoto?” The blind creature called again. “Are you there? Have you come to speak to me?”

Yamame felt bile pump up into her gullet.

At first, she had no idea why. But, as the imitation stared searchingly into the nothingness it saw, she had plenty apt opportunity to divine the well-spring of her revulsion.

The thing _knew his name._

More, for it was calling him. As one would a friend. As one might a confidant.

The simple fact slashed open a pocket of realisations Yamame Kurodani had not seen – had not been _allowed_ to see – before. But, having once peered into the _Yatagarasu_ eye carried by the god-raven, Utsuho, she knew all at once what the wretched thing in front of her truly was.

It was Paran. Not an imitation, not a fakery; it was the _original_ after whom her beloved human had taken his public name. It was the mask – the excuse with which Yamame’s envoy had guiled the concerns of their warrantees. It was the lie – born of hate, and later hated by its speaker.

It was the god, Paranseberi.

* * *

The god mewled. Animal impulse saw it drop forward to all-fours.

“Naoto? Naoto! Speak to me – please!”

Yamame Kurodani, the eldest of the earth spiders (against whom the god was sworn), swallowed down an almost solid lump of sick, blighted saliva. She breathed in. She filled her lungs of the godling’s effluence. The taste made her want to add her own into the fold.

A low, spiteful whisper sizzled off her tongue ahead her lips might shut and lock it in.

“… He cannot hear you.”

The godling’s ears, nowhere so impaired as its eyes, were alerted with spider accuracy to Yamame’s location. The unseeing, unseen face swung her way, at once furious, wishful and afraid. The familiar, absurd medley of emotions hurt to watch. It made her desperately long to be yesterday.

“… Who?” the blind god was demanding. “Who is this? Where is he?”

Yamame’s reply was flat.

“He cannot hear you.”

“Who says so?” The godling’s manner grew crazed. “What have you done? Who are you?”

Yamame Kurodani paused amid a surge of unreasoning hate and pity for the ragged being. She saw herself, braced on widespread feet, stately and dangerous even in her chubby, female body. Her mouth was pursed tight; her nose was drawn from the reek of decomposition and bubbling humours. She saw the godling – ill and starved, stooping in its own filth. The misery was perfectly counterpointed by the immaculate white of its robes.

But still, the spider thought, it was an enemy. The course she had promised to her human seemed frayed and immaterial beside access to the villain who had given the slip to her sisters. The one who had devastated her home. The one who had, even earlier, ravelled her in allegations of a motiveless murder. The one whose existence alone had denied her her lover’s real name.

And now, that bastard creature, the so-called spider god, was begging _her_ name, egging her on. Yamame Kurodani was an earth spider; by the very nature of her species she was disinclined to unprovoked hostility. A spider did not attack unless attacked; it was far too designing and arithmetic a kind for that. It had to be pushed; it had to be harried to lash out.

This very good counted.

The mother of plagues unsheathed her fangs. She threw out a pose, for no effect but to discharge the tightness in her limbs. She indulged the nascent god’s request.

“My name is…” she began, “… I am Yamame Kurodani.”

The godling stilled as if paralysed. Its jaw hung slack. The spittle-flecked lips moved with numb motion. They mimed the shape of the name. Again. And again. Its useless eyes glazed over as it seemed to think. To weave something out of fleeing memories. To dredge it up.

At last, to know.

No prior brush with the divine might have cushioned Yamame against what stitched out. The mother of plagues squinted, stiff and queasy, as the Paran-god crumpled backward onto its seat. The slime pooled around it splashed, wrinkled – belching up bubbles of carrion gas. The godling’s filthy hair arced in the air when it threw its head back. It hinged open its mouth…

… And cackled.

The threat of the eldest, deadliest of earth spiders poised before it did nothing to obscure its sick amusement. It cackled on, until Yamame’s teeth were grinding and her stomach turned. It cackled still even as it spoke.

“I have found her!” it exulted. “I have found her, Naoto! She is here! At last, at lassst—”

The cackling exclamations were snipped as the Paran-god burst into life.

It swung its arms over its head, fists balled. It hammered them down into the foetid pool with such virile speed, Yamame’s spider’s eyes had never registered it until it was done. The pool split. A hurl of sludge, puke-water and scraps of half-digested things exploded all around the godling. Yamame curled. She danced back, out of the range of falling projectiles. She kept her mind cold, steady – patiently hanging back at the periphery of the attack.

And that was how the godling had wanted it.

A single tendril of hyper-condensed venom lanced under the onslaught at the spider. A spear-tip shot of the blackest poison, superbly camouflaged in the raining sewage.

She had no time to duck. The fishgig of toxins hooked the side of her neck. She yelped, wincing. A misled instinct slapped her hands over the wounded place. The mistake was made plain when the skin on her palms began to sting and flake. Her _youkai_ ’s core raced, pulsing, to restore its physical sheath. But this venom was more potent by half than what had been used to render down the soft forest life. The wound seeped, leaking pus and runny flesh down the collar of her earthen dress. Yamame moaned, for the first time, in pain.

Ahead of her, the Paran-thing had stood up. It was reaching for the sky. It laughed – cried – laughed again in manic glee, even as the last of the filthy rain pattered off its undefiled robes.

“I’ve done it!” it gloated. “I’ve done it, Naoto! I’ve harmed her! I’ve hurt the monster! Will you speak to me now? I’ve done as you asked! Naoto? Speak to me! NAOTO!”

It was the name.

It was, once more, the name that did it. Not the shock; not the trauma of wounding. Not the pain. Not her own body tainting the dress which had been lovingly sewn to contain it. It was the name. Its repeated, demented, irreverent use. Its innocent sound tainted by the godling’s toxic tongue. It was the jealous awareness that it had known it – while _she_ had _not_ – that broke her.

Yamame Kurodani, the earth spider, the eldest among the Underworld’s spinstresses, gnashed her hollow, envenomed teeth. Her head swam. She swayed on her feet, clutching at the wet, corroded flesh of her neck, and hissed. She hissed like an overfilled kettle, as her hate, envy and anger boiled furiously to the fore of her brain.

The heat-spill of emotions ate away at a set of restraints somewhere in the gut of her soul. A set of restraints she herself had placed. A set that she, Yamame Kurodani, had fashioned of her own unrepressed will to fetter an ability which she had vowed would never again be released without a reason.

The restraints softened, flexed… and fell away into the abyss below, as the mother of plagues unleashed her darkest gift.

There was no arcane gesture. No word of power. No flourish to the spell. The one instant the godling was cackling; the next, it was collapsed on its knees, retching up chunks of diseased meat and gangrenous blood. It gaped with unaffected shock down at the innards evacuating its own body. It took it five foul, delicious heartbeats to wrap its flimsy, new-born mind around what had happened.

What had been done to it.

 _Who_ had done it.

As it rounded on her, drooling blood on its no more unstained robes, Yamame Kurodani thought, in a less frenzied part of her brain, that misalignments may have been made. That, as she had its human peer in an entirely unlike circumstance, she had rattled the god-Paran’s sanity too far out with this direct assault. That, by employing the very method which had touched off its birth, the yearly malady may have sunk her fangs too close its abscessed heart.

The timid theory was confirmed when the godling began to shriek. The forest floor shivered in sympathetic pain. And as her own power had been brought to bear, so too now Paranseberi called on its domain in full capacity with no theatrics of a warning.

The spider god’s soul tore asunder, and out its pestilential depths blew a _hurricane_ of pollution.

It punched into the earth spider like a falling tower. The calamitous, malign wind lashed and ripped at her undefended body.

It stripped away her skin.

It dried and scraped out her eyes.

It blasted inside her mouth and burst open her cheeks. It batted down her faceless body and clawed at her broken, flayed limbs. Slowly, without mercy, the howling wrath of the insane god peeled away everything that she was…

… Until only the spider in her marrow remained.

* * *

Instinct.

Intent.

The arachnid mind knew little difference.

Out of a fold in reality, the great spider barged into existence. From out of shadows in mind-space, some infinitesimal crack between legend and life, it surged into abrupt physicality. It emerged to a world flooding in distressingly from all somatic vectors. A world of light, pheromone-scents and battling vibrations. Of raging, hostile pressures. Of violence.

It arrested its leap, almost delicate on its pointed feet. It touched down, its bulbous abdomen skidding on the moist, slick ground. In the same time-span it took a fly to cycle its wings fiftyfold, the spider’s elongated brain appreciated its new circumstance in full. The state it was in.

_Attacked._

It rode out the black, abrasive wind, flattening defensively. Villain currents kinked and snarled the feeling-hairs spaced along its legs. They reaved the spider of its favoured sense. Its complex mouth-parts splayed, hinging up, fat mandibles screening the octet of fragile, lidless eyes atop its head. It was blinded, deaf and confused.

But, even here, amid sensory chaos, there was an underlying pattern. A weave. A direction to the assault.

The spider’s teardrop head moved on its waist-neck. A thread was thrummed in its hyper-specialised brain. A bundle of threat-response synapses fired in vicious synchrony – swapping out the brain’s entire paradigm.

From _attacked_ … to _attack._

The great spider slid lightly, skilfully, under one whiplash blast conjured by the unseen, unfelt enemy, and rolled around the second. It thundered into the third, its bulk carrying it through – its hooked feet easily snatching purchase even from the quagmire terrain. The spider hammered into the attacking shadow, wielding its two foremost limbs like humans of old wielded their strange, cold, mirror-sheen wing-shells that attached weirdly to their wingless arms.

The assailant vibrated at a frustrating frequency, briefly. Then it crashed backwards into the bog.

As if at the touch of a god, the filth-storm abated. The torrent snapped; it coiled, rumbled once, and slurped out of the forest-space through a non-dimensional hole. The air hushed with an unnatural, sticky eagerness. A nigh-noon Sun reasserted itself over the tree-tops – pouring its light down on the glade like a thick, lukewarm blanket.

The great spider splayed out its limbs. In its relief, it rubbed the wetted mouth-parts over its irritated eyes. Its less-weighed hind-legs strummed the main, mobility limbs in a frantic effort to disentangle the precious hairs. Ahead of it, somewhat laterally, the assailant ruptured out of the swamp.

The spider moved before it thought to move. It pounced, impossibly, from a stand-still position, smacking aside the attacker’s upraised front limbs. The hard, flesh-wrapped ball seated between them flashed with new definition when the assailant cracked wide its colourless sensory orbs. Its breathing orifice was spread open; and it fell bodily as its paired, twin lower limbs gave out underneath it. It splashed back into the swamp, scurrying and vibrating.

The spider wavered.

It loomed, hesitating, over the questionable prey-shape – half-expecting a quiet, female voice to come out and harshly tell it no. It waited, drooled, each wasted nerve-tick feeding into its annoyance. It deferred to the voice’s decision.

… But none was coming.

The sweet, young, female voice which had so oft spoken softly to its mind – at times chiding, at times advising, like a gentle brood-mother – was silent. It did not tell the great spider no. It did not croon, “Not-prey, not-prey” into its ear. It did not chide. It did not say anything.

So prey it was.

The great spider’s fangs slashed out of their sleeves with a spray of pressurised fluids. The spider pinned the writhing man-thing down. It stabbed one of the long, onyx-black blades into the tender gap between the prey’s shoulder-joint and its neck.

The blade glided past the layer of skin, sinking in a full quarter of its length ahead it ran into first resistance. The spider clenched, ignoring the prey’s cacophonic vibrations and thrashing limbs. The micro-serrated edge sawed into and past the warm, palpitating organs with a slick, sensual ease. When at last the first fang was hilted in the prey’s quivering torso, the spider stretched its multi-parted face… and, unceremoniously, punched the second one up under the man-thing’s ribs.

As it pumped the twitching body tight with venom and preliminary enzymes, the spider cast its simple mind back onto its own self.

It touched along its decentralised brain with soft, concerned nerve-probes. It ran its imaginary legs over the place inside itself whence the voice had always come… and found it numb. It found it swollen. Hard. The voice’s home was a beady nub under the rind of its soul. A clot. A cyst wrapped around some metaphysical damage the spider had not received nor understood.

What it did understand was that the voice had been _wounded_ somehow. That it needed help. Healing. A dose of energy. Nutrition. Sustenance.

It needed _to eat._

The spider turned its caring attention inside-out. The prey’s body, which still hosted its fangs, had distended. It was dead – dead, soft and ripe for consumption. The fangs slid out of the mushy torso. They snagged on the paper-thin skin, tearing out little chunks of pulpy, pre-digested meat.

Its complex feeding piece flowered out to reveal a black, dribbling gullet.

Not knowing – or caring – what it was it had killed, the great spider began to eat.

* * *


	38. Kurodani Yamame has no gods

She stumbles out of the poisoned glade bleary, sluggish and bloated.

She sways. Her nude feet kiss into the hot, marshy forest floor. They suck free, tugging away at her already weakened balance. She did not find her shoes. They are gone – as is most everything in an eye-leap’s radius. The trees are excoriated. Their bark has been pared off. Their naked, creamy stems stand defenceless in the insect-heavy air. The forest floor is razed. Still, rotting life litters the ground.

Kurodani Yamame walks on. She smothers down the urge to bend over and heave. The sour desolation stretches on, even as she totters out onto the Sun-baked mountain road. She throws the few final steps out almost by willpower alone, and crumples beside her waiting human.

She gives in and lets her stomach cramp freely over a patch of wet, diseased grass. The spider’s meal does not come out. She retches for a full, painful minute – but the loathsome, sticky essence remains lodged in her soul. She spits out a string of yellowed, bilious drool, and wipes an arm across her mouth. She sits up, smiling a rueful little smile at her human.

He does not smile back. But then, she figures he has scant little incentive to do so.

She apologises. She tells him, in a nauseous, faltering voice, that she is sorry. That her pride ran ahead of her wits. That the godling’s backlash quite whelmed over her blackest expectations. That she never meant for things to escalate so. That she is deeply, penitently sorry.

Her human does not reply. But then, Yamame remembers, he has only lately learned to speak to her at length at all.

She asks him whether he has seen what took place in the poisoned clearing – then answers, ahead he may, that neither does she. She explains the memories of her spider core are inaccessible; that the monster’s sense-recollections are coded in a way which her human shape simply cannot understand. She says, weakly, that the godling wasn’t there when she came to. She lies that she does not know where it has gone.

She speeds up. She tells her human, again, how sorry she is. She says, once more, that this has been her fault, hers alone; that her jealousy drove her up a mental wall, rendered her dumb. That, whatever sour relation Kurodani Yamame has effected between the human and his god, she will endeavour to mend it. That she will replace it however she can. She promises him this.

Paran stares on without speaking. But then, Yamame knows, he can do nothing else.

As if rousing at last from a long, romantic dream, Kurodani Yamame looks up at the motionless face of her first and only lover. She sees the handsome, slightly scraggly, but lovable features. She sees the lips she has been taught feel very good on hers. She sees the brows over the human’s fantastic eyes, squished into a dim, somewhat distressed frown.

She sees the dry, milky crust collected on the rims of his eyelids. She sees the eyes themselves, frozen in a faint expression of surprise, or some mistake realised too late. She sees the purple veins clearly under the bedsheet-white skin. They are dilated, turgid from coagulating blood. She sees the stale, sickness-laced saliva trickling down his chin. She sees his still, unmoving chest.

She does not know, at first, how to feel.

A flight of memories swims up to the surface of her mind. The catching of her human’s name. The clumsy attempts to redefine their acquaintance afterwards. The baring of the human’s strange desire to embrace spiders on their visit to the underground Capital. Hijiri’s missive. Their asinine bet on the same evening, which spurred on even less innocent things. The accusations, which her human soundly rejected. The few consequent days, full of creativity and pleasant distraction. The six days of project that arrived, then culminated when something treacherous was unveiled. The next morning, when more treachery yet came out to light. Its diffident forgiving on the Sun-scorched flatland road. The discovery of her eaten home. The educative sojourn in Komeiji’s private realm. An argument and a resolution. The three dreamlike nights in consequence, of being filled with her human’s love. The fervent declarations when at last Hachiashi broke the news… which may or may not have pushed him to pre-empt her confrontation with his god.

All of these have changed something inside the spider. All of them have by degrees caused it to desire more from life than the empty idleness of its sisters or the constant, mindless revelry of the Oni. All of them have made the spider crave something… someone… who would satisfy its deeper, both higher and lower appetites. They have made it hopelessly will that someone to love it, despite its sins.

And now, they have left it with this bitter end. Paran’s lifeless stare drives it in like a mallet.

The earth spider begins to cry.

She cries as the Sun rides the sky into noon. She raises plaintive, desperate pleas up into the humid summer air. Nothing heeds them.

Kurodani Yamame has no gods.


	39. Epilogue

Winter was creeping in.

Morning had dawned dewy and mild; but, across the hours following, the Sun had nurtured a shy streak and fled above the blanket of granite-grey clouds. Moisture had frozen, spinning a spiderweb-crack rime of frost on the tired soil. The air was thin, static; even over the open fields which enwreathed the humans’ walled town, the wind, it seemed, had taken a breather. Not a blade of grass was bent.

A ways removed from the town, more nearby the Buddhist hive of _Myouren-ji_ than anyplace else, a peculiar stretch of terrain had been sectioned off from its surrounds. A shepherd’s stone fence had been stacked, in some past time, to mind its border. The ground had been levelled. Alleys, crossing and criss-crossing, were running the enclosure in a decussated pattern. The gaps in the weave were filled out with long, flat slabs of sanded stone.

There were many, many like slabs in the yard. Each had, on its placing, been labelled with a singular name. Some names were etched on plaques of wood; some – with special opulence – had been scribed in bas-relief in the slabs themselves. Some were without names – unremembered, or never revealed. Each was someone consigned to the earth beneath.

It was a yard of graves. A haunting ground. Not for the dead; for those were long waiting their lines in the courts of the _Yama_. It was a place (paradoxically) for those yet living. For humans – to contemplate the stones which now stood in for their loved ones. For _youkai_ – to stalk in hopes of quenching their unique hungers.

Over one such stone stood one such _youkai._

A lone wheeze of wind yawned, unnaturally, from the adjoining edge of the forest. Then, it stilled.

Yamame Kurodani, the earth spider, the great architect of the Underworld, all the same tucked the halves of her stiff, still-new coat tighter about her sides. The decision to take it along had been chance; seasons did little anything to influence the Underworld – less a slight, overall downturn in percolated rain. Up here, on the surface of the world, however, winter was firmly digging its claws in.

Yamame sighed. She was keeping a weather eye on the prowling _tsukumogami_ a few alleys distant. At the same time, she mulled over the stone at her feet. She read and re-read the name graven on its upper face. Again, and again – though the result was every time the same.

It was a name she had never known.

As the other _youkai_ moved on aimlessly, the earth spider crouched and touched a hand to the slab. It bit at the tips of her sensitive fingers with a hard, vindictive cold. Yamame did not yield. She kept touching the stone… until, at length, her skin drew and ached in a sharp, nerve-root objection. She flinched back.

“… Sorry,” she murmured, grimacing and righting up.

A moment slid by, and she felt a fool for apologising. The accustomed state of mind tweaked her cheeks into a smile. She giggled. It made her feel even more foolish.

The tittering spider poked a hand into a pocket of her coat, and out produced an otherworldly, scarlet rose. The rose was stunted and foxed from the journey; it was stolen as well – smuggled out from the subterranean lighthouse tended by Yamame’s Oni mentor, Nikuyama. It did not _have_ to have been stolen; Niku would have packed his “little spider” a crate of the roses had she but asked. But the spider had been in a contrary mood. She had pinched one of the dwarf flowers at the stem, stuffed it in her coat, and brought it out here. To the world above. To see the Sun – for the first and only time in generations.

She placed the rose on the grave.

“… I am sorry, too,” she promised. She kept her voice a whisper, so as not to alert the sneaking _tsukumogami_. “I really am. I’d never meant for… anything. I hadn’t meant for you to come and… That’s why I am sorry. But, all together, despite everything… Thank you. Really, really thank you.”

The stone did not reply. Yamame smiled even so.

As the timid Sun winked through a tear in its cloudy overlay, the eldest among the Underworld’s spinstresses turned away and began to walk. She picked an alley which would keep her under the other _youkai_ ’s notice. She circled round it, until the cemetery’s fence loomed out of the overgrowing brush. Yamame hopped it with spider ease.

The ritual done, the earth spider bolted her mind around less spiritual matters. She stitched the spell at the back of her head, and rose, smoothly, into _Gensokyo_ ’s overcast sky.

A peek round for spying eyes, and she sailed east on the wintry air – for the humans’ terracotta-roofed town.

* * *

The months intervening _the incident_ and now had been busy.

When second-best, Hachiashi, had proposed to “clean up” the remains of Yamame’s home would be necessary, she had spoken in euphemism. The house’s corpse had to be extirpated altogether. Nothing structurally sound had been spared the dissolution; even the sturdy, marble pillars (taken from the ruined palaces of the _Yama_ ) which had served as padstones for her home, had been left stained, porous and ruddy. Like rotten teeth. She had pulled them all – with the help of her sisters.

The younger earth spiders had as one entreated their eldest to move in with them in the absence of a private den. Yamame Kurodani, staunchly, had put their offers down. She bade her nights, instead, nearer to her work. She slept on a rough cot fashioned from sack-cloth and bales of raw fabric, nested as they might best be atop her beloved human’s push-cart. The cart had lodged, miraculously, in a bend of the existing staircase; thus, it had been excluded from the godling’s bout of acid misery. Not every one of Hijiri’s grants to the earth spiders had survived its stay in the tunnels (nor, indeed, the spiders’ attentions); still, what Yamame hadn’t used in making her bed (or quartered out to her impatient sisters) had made for good barter in the underground Capital, once she had ventured down to shop for materials.

The large-hearted Oni had proven most helpful (at least they had once Nikuyama had lent his long-unused arbiter’s voice); and, within few weeks in following, the little cavern in the outlets of the Underworld had been seeing creativity the like it had not in an aeon. With piles of powdery bricks, bundles of oil-conserved planks, bags of lime mortar and glue, and one spider huffing and sweating, it had been made a busy scene.

Other earth spiders came and went in numbers: in twos or threes at first – then, trickling down, by themselves – to butt into their eldest sister’s work. Not always with effect; some sitting by without use until evening hours; all the same every day saw one of the younger spiders come to watch Yamame stir the mortar, saw the wood and stack the bricks.

She had figured the method in their visits ahead much too long. It was a schedule. A queue – like as not Hachiashi’s mathematics. To keep Yamame’s tabs. To make certain of the elder spider’s well-being. To keep watch of her mental state. All, obviously, very needless; but, if her family had a stake of honour in worrying, then all Yamame had to do was let them. It cost her scarce at all; and, at the end of each day, it gave her someone whom to bid an honest good-night.

That alone, perhaps, paid off the indignity. A side of it, anyway.

Satori Komeiji, likewise, had made some attempt at diplomacy.

A mere month subsequent of their last meeting, Yamame Kurodani had been tugged out of her sleep by the _tap-tap-tap_ of booties on the stone and the _swish-swish-swish_ of oversized sleeves. The youngest of clan Komeiji, dumpy in her grandmother’s floral smock, had come to make amends. To let the earth spider know an inquiry by one of the Hakurei shrine maiden’s affiliates had been mounted (and thoroughly dismounted by Old Hell’s authorities) as well – but to make amends first of all.

San Komeiji owned little of the flair for rhetoric her father did; thus, her explanation had been simple.

“She is sorry,” the flawed mind-reader had said. “She may not have told me to tell you in so many words, but this was what she was.”

Yamame had nodded that she’d understood.

“Would you like me to carry back an answer?” the girl had asked.

The earth spider had shaken her head from atop the cart.

San had made a face. “This is going to hurt her.”

“Yes,” Yamame had replied.

The youngest Komeiji had been visibly disaffected by the response. Still, she had taken it – slotted it inside a mental envelope – and left the earth spider to her work.

The work was coming along nicely, too – if nicety included a stock of old, crumbling bricks in not near to adequate a quantity. Two rooms of serviceable size and a kitchen had been the ruling of Yamame’s calculations. Not even half the size of her previous home. Never ahead had the loss of her human’s resources been felt any keener; and, short of months to scavenge about the site of the Old Capital for yet-unearthed stockpiles, two rooms and a kitchen had no recourse but to do.

And do they would. Soon. Something else beckoned for the while.

Yamame Kurodani, the mother of plagues, the (self-) exiled, touched quietly down between two taller buildings at the periphery of the humans’ walled town.

A chunk of apprehension dropped and strained the web around her heart when she saw townspeople in strength passing by beyond the mouth of the alley. The earth spider wrapped it up. As well as she wrapped herself tighter in her clothes. She had counted on her cloak, muffler and cap to deflect inquisitive eyes; now, counting still, she padded out of the shadow to join the wandering humans.

To find her destination had been as easy (and difficult) as asking around.

Though Yamame had been given the desired name and location on her first incursion (and after but a few pragmatic questions); but, to whet her appetite and blunt her misgivings, she had given it two and three and four more to place her goal against her mental lay of the town. When the yearly malady weaved among the commuting humans now, her steps were brisk, industrious – spider-like. No one stopped her, and she stopped for no one.

Then, as she turned a confident, well-practiced corner, presently her destination leapt into view.

A fenced, well-tended estate spanned fully the length of this street; even as Yamame cautiously approached, she might see the thick, imposing wings of its front gate – flung wide open to convey messengers and teams of loaded, hand-drawn wagons. The memory of her human pushing his own cart along in a cloud of sweat and strangled curses flitted in and out of her mind. The teams leaving the estate were doing little of the former – and much of the latter. They passed the lone Yamame by, with never a care but for loudly speculating the lineage of their next customer. The spinstress felt her mouth quirk up. Business, it seemed, was as business was; it mattered not whether made by humans or by cast-out _youkai_.

She muffled her amusement in her scarf and stepped boldly through the opened gate.

A wide avenue ran immediately from the threshold. Wide enough for six earth spiders to march abreast – or two wagons to brush by with the littlest room for accidents and yelling; it ran and ran, until terminating in the distance on the porch of a broad, single-storey house designed after the historic, eastern mode apparently imposed on _Gensokyo_ ’s humans. To both sides of the avenue, rows and rows of storage sheds, shelter-roofs and loading platforms were arranged – and amply jammed with merchandise.

The merchandise was fabrics. It was bales and bolts and folded squares of cloth of all make, colour and spin.

Yamame Kurodani ground to a halt as her expert’s eyes pulled in familiar patterns. She _had seen_ some of these fabrics. She had passed them between her fingers. She had even worn some. Ahead she parsed what it might mean, her feet carried her aside from the approach and under one of the weather-beaten roofs.

A sheaf of stiff, coffee-ground-dye canvas lay on a flat bamboo platform – ready to be carted out. It lay there innocently; only Yamame knew it would absolutely murder the fingers of any hapless clothier who might wish to shape it into something useful. She knew this – simply for it had _already murdered hers._ The outer skin of her new coat had been cut from it.

_But why?_ Yamame wondered. Why was the same fabric, which her beloved human had collected as part of Hijiri’s reimburse, here? In his family home?

No answer presented. No answer could – for they were all routed by a voice speaking at Yamame’s back.

“Hello? Miss? Can I help you?”

The spinstress span about to find a young, human woman fixing her with a politely commanding stare. A small, thin woman, who could not have been too far on the worse side of adulthood – bundled up in a plain work _kimono_ and a warm winter wrap. Her long, coal-black hair was tied in a tight bun atop her head. The high, naked forehead – together with the sharp, angular eyes – somehow put Yamame in mind of a poising snake. The snake wasn’t _ugly_ – other than its lacking figure; it was even, in some slippery, snaky way, pretty. Nor was it, for the moment, about to strike.

All the same, Yamame felt a jealous mislike well stubbornly under her heart.

“Miss?”

The woman, maybe sensing it, restated her demand. It snapped Yamame up to a full, attentive height. It was too close a match for her taste.

“Um…”

She hesitated. Words seemed, all of a sudden, a foolish thing. Not quite aware for what end, she tugged the cap off her head to allow her golden hair to spill down her shoulders. At length, she stitched out a sequence of words which, while still foolish, were at least not a lie.

“I am…” she said, “… I am Yamame Kurodani.”

The woman flinched, startled. Almost, and Yamame would have wagered she would cry out in shock. That she would announce her surprise to all within the bustling yard. She would have lost that wager.

For then, miracle of miracles, gods above stepped down – and the woman threw a loop of mental rope around her reactions.

She dragged them down – together with a wiry hand across her face.

“… _Of course,_ ” she murmured into her palm.

Ahead the earth spider might question of _which_ course, the woman’s poise was patched back whole. She hung her (twiggy) arms and inflated her (even so flat) chest.

“Of course,” she agreed, all official again. “You would be. Follow me, if you’ll please.”

Then, haughtily, she heeled around on one foot – and started for the spacious house at the end of the boulevard.

Yamame followed.

* * *

She had been led to a room in the rear, business-less section of the house.

Not one work-stooped servant they had passed in the house’s wood-panel corridors had overmuch paid mind to their passage. None had dared to pay mind, more pertinently – stepping out of the snake-like woman’s path as soon as noticing her slither their way. A huntress inside her grounds, the woman had shown Yamame into the room, advised taking a seat, and curtly instructed the earth spider to wait. Then, she had jammed the sliding-panel door close, and slithered off to fuss somewhere else.

Miracle of miracles, Yamame Kurodani had not minded a great deal herself. She’d imagined she had recognised some of the thoughts bulging the veins under the woman’s despotic skin. The thoughts weren’t too far off her own, once upon a time. The room had a straw-mat floor, a low table, four walls, and little else besides. Nothing much to thread her attention but to fall in and wait, Yamame had sat down at the table – and waited.

She had an idle ten of minutes to herself, to feel out the twill in the mats and count the knots in the table-top. She hadn’t counted all when her diversions were slipped away under the backcloth.

A _slap-slap_ rush of feet, egressing from down the hallway without, came to a halt behind the door. There was a pause. A tap. Then, the sliding-panel door swished into openness.

Another human was kneeling on the floor of the entering side. A woman. A short, stout female, wending her way well into an age when salty streaks were colouring random wisps of her hair. As the snaky one had been, this one as well was rolled up in an indifferently-cut, functional robe. A twin pair of steaming, earthenware cups were rested on a wooden tray before her. A subtle tea-scent tinged the air of the room.

The servant (she had to be) served no heed to the _youkai_ at the table; with a click of worn joints, she righted up to a weary stand. She bent over and picked up the tray; then, having first crossed the step of the door, she lowered herself back onto her knees. She set aside the laden tray and pushed close the door.

Ceremony satisfied, the ageing servant woman stood up again. She shuffled over to where Yamame was seated, and – never speaking – deposited one of the cups. As the earth spider was densely nodding her thanks, the woman turned to circle round to the other side of the table.

Sighing, she sat down.

Yamame had not expected nor requested to be brought a drink – but was glad being able to bore her eyes into its walnut depths when the servant showed no tells of leaving. Still, it was an ill place to hide a nervousness, and Yamame’s did not soon improve. Too distracted to fully register it, the spinstress raised the cup and breathed in a very familiar scent. It did little to better her like of the situation, but she tried a cautious sip all the same. The woman opposite of her seemed to mimic her motions. She lifted the other cup up to her lips and drank.

When the cups were returned to the table, it was almost in comical synchrony.

Against the tension inside her chest, Yamame began to giggle. She checked it fast – but not enough. The servant was staring.

“Ah, um—” The earth spider flushed. “… Sorry. I’m… I’m not good at this.”

The aged woman canted her head slightly to the side, as if admitting curiosity. She did not let it out it immediately, but when she did, she had a rich, resonant voice. A calming, almost sing-song voice, which all but put Yamame Kurodani in mind of things she – as a _youkai_ – had never had.

“… Good at what?” the woman asked.

The earth spider shunted aside her bizarre associations. She dumbly shrugged her shoulders. “This,” she said. “I’m not good at this. At talking to humans.” She caught the innuendo in her words as they fled her mouth. She grimaced. “I—I mean, talking to you. You, townspeople. I mean… Um…”

Though she had half envisaged the servant would at least match her in expression (likely far worse); but the older woman merely cocked one of her brows.

“… Evidently,” she observed.

A few heartbeats went by that Yamame properly strung herself up in her head. An earth spider above all, she was good at that. The servant sampled her tea more ahead she further pursued their conversation.

“You are, then,” she said, sizing up the pin-cushioned spider, “Yamame… Kurodani?”

Yamame Kurodani surrendered a nod. “Yes.”

“The spider of illness?” the woman wanted to know. “The yearly malady?”

“… Yes.”

“The one from beneath the Goddesses’ Mount? The one who dispatched the head of this household?”

Yamame shrank. “… I didn’t mean to do that,” she protested. “Not _on purpose._ I never wanted to—”

“I know.” The woman’s eyes were hard – as though she was speaking a truth, but one difficult to release. “I know. For what it is worth, too… I hold no grudge against you. Not anymore. Yamame Kurodani has done _some_ wrongs—” she smiled at a bitter angle, “—but not this one. We know this. We’ve all known it. Some of us simply… had to blame _someone._ ”

Yamame stared back, uncertain whether she was being absolved or lured onto craggy terrain.

The woman seemed to catch her words weren’t seaming. She fanned a dismissal with one wrinkled hand, then looped it back again around her cup. Yamame watched as she daintily sipped away, all the while sewing her thoughts into some kind of whole.

“… Are we,” she sewed out at length, “… Are we waiting for someone?”

The servant smiled above her tea. “I should hope so.”

The smile went on drawing her cheeks as she settled down her cup and reached for Yamame’s disrobed coat. Ahead an objection might mount the earth spider’s tongue, the aged woman shook straight the cloth Yamame had folded with meticulousness until it had made a perfect square atop the table’s. When one did climb up, the spinstress swallowed it down again. _It is only a coat._ The objection yelped with spider urgency, but Yamame had clamped her mouth. No echo issued out.

The servant was running a testing hand along where the stiff, outer skin was joined to its quilted padding. Her lips were pursed.

“You made this, then?” she asked.

Yamame blinked. Then, she blinked once more. “Um—” she forced out (still over the objection), “Ye—Yes. I did. It’s… It’s a bit untidy; my home was wrecked lately; I had to make do with little anything. I’d wanted about twice as many buttons and a thicker undercoat, but… I’d run out. I had to mooch most of that felt off my sisters, and it’s… It hasn’t been in the greatest care, let’s say. The overlay is really too tough, too.”

“We do not usually use it for clothing,” agreed the woman.

“But I needed something,” Yamame went on. “I needed something for the season. For the rain. And, when I went and trialled the fabrics I had on hand, this one was letting in the least water. It wasn’t letting in any, really.”

“That is what it’s supposed to do,” the woman replied absently. Her fingertips probed along Yamame’s stitching as if hunting kinks. “Canvas is less permeable by itself. We… coax it to be less permeable still, is all.”

Now Yamame was listening. “Coax it… How?”

The woman quietly gauged whether an earth spider could keep a trade secret. Though, whichever side of the gauge she came out on, a finger all the same went up to cross her lips. Yamame, jolting, copied the gesture. The woman inclined her head.

“… It is waxed,” she revealed. “At the tail of each Spring, we buy out the last of beeswax stock off the keepers. Second-rate, most of it; though, it weighs in very little to our purposes. Come Fall, we take the blocks out and cook them over a fire until they run like oil. We rack the canvas and paint it with the wax. As you would a wall. On one side – so some plasticity is retained; with a lean brush – so it lays on not too thickly. We pull the canvas from the rack after a while; and two our biggest men wave it between themselves for a well good bit. The hardest of the wax flakes and shakes off. One more man takes a palette knife to it and peels away whatever yet sticks out. We then cut it, quarter it, and sell it. As roofing, package wrapping, proofing, work surfaces…”

“But not for coats,” guessed Yamame.

“No,” confirmed the servant. “Not for coats. Too tough. Too much work.”

The earth spider grinned. “My bad.”

The woman fondling her coat made a replying sound. The reply was somehow displeased. “… And you made this,” she said, critically, “All of it, by yourself?”

“Um. Yes. I… I normally do.”

“All by hand?”

Yamame thought it over. “… I had a thimble. That probably sped things up.”

“No machine?” The old woman was scowling. “No… press, no hand-wheel?”

“… Hand-wheel?”

The woman let the coat slide from her hands. She shook her head, as if privately criticising someone’s obvious lapse.

Almost, and Yamame Kurodani would have wounded at this review. Almost, and she would have launched into a fierce defence of her work. Almost, and the mother of plagues, the eldest of the Underworld’s spinstresses, would have demanded to be shown this “hand-wheel” and how it could have done better than her own, seasoned fingers. Almost, and she would have done all of that.

But then, something else swapped out her indignation.

A rush of footfalls ripped into the hall beyond the room. A flight of heavy, clamorous footsteps, frantically gaining in volume.

The woman opposite of Yamame smirked. Then, she hid her face behind her tea-cup so quickly, the spinstress could no more say there had ever been a smirk at all. The panicked steps halted abruptly outside.

The door slammed open wide, rattling in its frame.

A man stumbled forward into the room.

* * *

He stopped. Caught his balance. His eyes scraped lengthwise the table between the two females. They snared on the human one. The brows above them hugged.

“… Why, this?” the man demanded.

The woman – the ageing, portly one – ignored him. She held her cup, tilted, up to her lips, until the tea was drained. Then, she set it back on the tray. When she spoke, her voice had a tangible arch to it. A kind of sportive lilt. Not at all like a servant’s.

“Our tenant has deigned to be carted out of bed, I see,” she said. “At last, might I add,” she faithfully did add; “I’d near run out of topics to entertain our guest. Scarcely proper, making me do that. You know I am busy.”

The man steamed his resentment. “… Akari took her time fetching me.”

“Always those,” the servant (or was she?) exhaled. “Always the girls, mucking things up for you. Aren’t they? Akari, _Yamame—_ ”

The earth spider jerked straight at the sound of her name.

“—always them,” finished the woman, “knotting your laces, ruffling your hair. When- _ever_ shall you disabuse yourself of this _terrible_ gender?”

He secured no answer, breathing out his rush, glaring his frustration. Though he did step in to assist the woman once she moved to stand; but the old servant (she really wasn’t, was she?) smacked him away. She rose on clicking knees, sweeping up the tray.

“Ask, then,” she said, alarmingly breathless, “our guest, whether she’ll will to stay for dinner. I’ll have the cooks know. If you wish, too, you could join us – if your harsh sleep schedule’ll weather.”

“Thanks,” he said drily. Then, his face furrowed with suspicion. “… Why?”

The woman rolled her eyes at the ceiling. “Winter is inside the month,” she explained, mock-suffering. “An architect is unlike to see a lot of custom once snows begin to fall thick. I may have something to bridge her over. We but need to talk, first.”

Again, the man had no reply but for glowering his helplessness. The aged non-servant brushed by him, intent, for the door still open after his entry. A foot past its frame, and she twisted about.

“I imagine,” she said, “that the two of you both have things to say. I’ll leave you to say them in quiet. An hour should do, yes?”

“… Yes,” the man gave up.

“Then I expect an answer within the hour.”

“… Very good.”

The woman’s gaze took on a stern edge. “Ask her,” she repeated. “I won’t slip the Hakurei on her; nobody will. And if, then, she proves to me as trained a seamstress as you’ve repeatedly lined her out… I _will_ deliver on what I said. May I depend on you? Naoto?”

The man, shutting his eyes, let go of a long, hoarse, grinding sigh. At its end, however – all sighed out – he seemed a mere half of his previous, angry size. He refilled his chest of the room’s musty air. At length, he looked, meekly, to the awaiting woman.

“… I’ll ask,” he surrendered, “… Mother.”

A feat of long years bullying obedience out of an entire household, the woman managed not to shape even an impression of a smile at her victory. She bowed her shoulders, instead – a weak, but mannered curtsy – at Yamame. Then, she quit the room fully – slid the abused door close with an unoccupied hand – and left.

And then, they were alone.

* * *

The man, for a time, continued his scowling of the door.

At last – once he was amply satisfied it wasn’t like to split back ajar in a burst of overbearing parents – he slumped his back and swivelled on one leg. In a few terse, cutting strides, he reclaimed the spot at the table whence his mother had been diverting their guest. He dropped, weightily, down onto the straw-mat floor. The floor was tough; it squeezed a hiss of pain out of his throat. He rubbed his seat, annoyed.

Yamame Kurodani observed him. The eldest, most deadly of the Underworld’s earth spiders silently marked her time as the human kneaded away his mistake and began mining for his words. He would hack them from what Yamame had learned had always been a hard deposit. The type of deposit which commanded time – time, tools and effort – to extract. The words would chip out _eventually;_ she but had to wait.

So, she waited. So, she observed.

All told, it was an odd sensation. His presence… The sight of him, his sounds, the accustomed motions… They were insidious. Like cherry wine poured down the crystal web of her mind. The clarity of purpose afforded by her work was quickly smeared a blush red. Her home – her precious new home, of two rooms and a kitchen – seemed now someway far away and false. A distraction with no real artistry or use.

Odder, for the longer she touched the feeling, the more hardly the spider inside felt it a problem – or even strange. _What are you spinning now, Yamame Kurodani?_ wondered a more structured, the self-conscious Yamame. The outer one didn’t answer the question. She perked up, excited, when she spied her human about to discharge his bounty.

He did discharge it, too. He rumbled the mined words out in one, unbroken spill.

“… I am sorry,” he said.

Yamame received it with a grateful smile. Nobody had promised the bounty would be big.

“You are?” she indulged.

Her human sighed dramatically. “… For my mother,” he clarified. “For what she probably said to you. I apologise for that.”

“Oh?”

He rapped the fingers of one of his hands on the table. “This is what she does,” he grunted. “When she has no idea how else to broach a conversation. She bites – until she makes a hole.”

“Seemed to me you were the one getting bit,” opined Yamame.

The man shook his head. “That is different. She has been… short with me like that ever since I came back. Conversation or regardless.”

“Why?”

“As like as not,” he said, “this is my punishment.” He shrugged. “I made it abundantly plain everything that had happened had been my fault. She made it abundantly plain she wouldn’t soon forgive my attempting in great earnest to rid her of another member of her family.”

Yamame made an encouraging smile. “That just means she cares, doesn’t it? In great earnest.”

Her human scoffed. “Akari says so,” he allowed. “Of course, Akari has been even worse.”

A patch of silence sewed into the air between them even as each considered what it entailed to be worse than the man’s scorned mother. Nothing much had been when the man spoke again.

“… I am sorry, Yamame.”

“So you’ve said,” the spinstress agreed. “What else for?”

“That I _wasn’t here,_ ” he said. “That I wasn’t up to greet you. That you had to go through… those.”

_Those,_ Yamame speculated inside, _meaning other women around you?_ “Then you knew?” she asked aloud. “That I was coming by to visit?”

The man’s head again swayed left and right. “That you were around.” He went on when she didn’t follow, “When one inquiries about for one of the business families, it comes around. You were, weren’t you? Inquiring?”

Yamame bit on a lip. “Um… Yes. I was. It seemed subtle when I thought it up.”

“Might have worked in your Capital,” speculated the man. “Here, though… Someone was on your case ahead long. Tattled on you to my mother; gave a description. It was a simple thing to guess. There aren’t many girls around with your… uh, looks.”

“My hair, right?” Yamame wanted to know. “It was, wasn’t it? I’d hoped I’d hid it.”

“Among less light things. But—” he added, as if tact had all but – yet not quite – wrung his neck for the comment, “—since then, I have been trying to… to stay on my toes. In case.”

“But…?” Yamame supposed.

“But,” the man complained, “it hasn’t been the easiest. I’d been told not to overexert. So, Mother put me to fixing accounts together with our clerks. That means sitting late nights over a candle and a mountain of figures. Mornings haven’t been kind on me.”

_Were they ever?_ the earth spider thought. But, for the sake of her human’s comfort, she let the argument lapse. _Good thing, then,_ she praised herself inside; good thing she’d gone to visit the man’s father ahead she had come for him. _Who would have rescued me if I’d been earlier?_

The picture pushed a smile out onto her lips. She smothered it with a hand.

“Yamame?”

“… It’s nothing.”

For a lonely heartbeat or five, every possible impulse to abandon this web tugged at her mental strings. To let it snap. To tear it down in a blow of laughter; to leap out from under the table and drown her human under those “less light” things. But humans, hers included, were like walls. The harder a spider laughed at them, the less like they were to let her through.

Yamame Kurodani, a spider since memory served, drew a lock of that troublesome hair of hers behind an ear.

“… So?” she said, disappointed, “Why didn’t you leave me a letter? A message? Anything?”

The man frowned at her. “… How?”

“ _Any_ -how.” The earth spider made a pout. “If you knew I was around… You could have written. You could have hammered it to a wall, or a roof. You could have had someone carry it to me. You could have _visited._ I’ve built a new home, you know? A mite more cramped than the last, but still. You would have fit.”

His frown deepened, as if smacked on the top. “… I wanted to.”

The refrain was growing familiar. “But?”

“Mother slipped hounds after me.” He sniffed. “They rolled me up like _futomaki_ and dragged me back.”

_How does a dog—?_ “And so?” she snapped, ahead her brain was beguiled by a silly mental image. “How did that prevent you leaving me a message? If you knew I’ve been around your town—”

A loud click of the man’s tongue tacked her questions to the insides of her cheeks. “… I wanted to,” he said again, grimly. “Yamame, I wanted to. Gods, I was about to bribe one of our runners to keep a look-out for you! A month’s savings – less my feedbag – from what loose change Mother deems worth my work.”

Yamame detected what was coming. “… But?”

“… But,” the man complied, “I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know. After what I… After I had lied to you yet again, after what you had to do… I couldn’t persuade myself you’d want to see me.” He raised his face when she didn’t reply. “… And you?” he pushed. “What about you? If you’ve been around town… Why didn’t you visit? I mean, before?”

The earth spider’s jaw hung open. She _clack_ ed it shut. Then, it opened again.

“I—” She hesitated. “… I didn’t think. That you’d want to see me. After what happened.”

The human stared at the spinstress. The spinstress stared at the human.

_You are a pair of pebbles in the same shoe,_ she chided herself. _Smooth as sandpaper, hard, and a snag to shake out._

He still shook out first, did Yamame’s human – as it seemed his humanly place. He blushed. He coughed. He pushed himself out from the table and fanned out his long, sleeve-sheathed arms.

“… _Yamame,_ ” he rasped.

_Come here, you idiot_ went unsaid.

Nor did it need be otherwise. The earth spider moved as her original did – without pre-thought. She scrambled over the table and flung herself into his embrace. A misled instinct – doubtless a build-up of propriety – saw him grasp at her arms as they were thrown around him. But they were two arms and only one human. They clasped on his back, followed closely by her legs. Her nose buried in his chest.

And then, she was home.

Her human groaned. Not from pain; her body (at least she hoped) had cushioned the impact for them both. But it blew the anyway strange thoughts of home from her singing mind. For now.

“… Yamame?” he wheezed.

“Mm. Yes?”

“… You feel heavier than I remember.”

Yamame said nothing. She pressed her lips softly to the base of his neck and inhaled the smell of his skin. The absence of a spoken answer fed back sooner than she would have liked.

“… There are still _things,_ ” went on her human. “Things I was never told. What happened. What really, _really_ happened. All I remember… All I’ve been able to remember is the forest, waiting… then a huge blast of wind, like a thunderclap, and—”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

The response was delayed. Confused. “… Yamame?”

“I _don’t want to talk_ about it,” she said once more, quieter.

She did not want to talk about it.

She did not want to recall how she had lifted her human’s numb body up from the devastated forest floor. She did not want to speak on how she had all but ripped _Gensokyo_ ’s weave (not to mention its skies) apart as she flew it toward the westering Sun. She had no wish, nor will, to remember casting her snares frantically, like a hatchling spider, all across the rousing landscape. She ill recalled the final stretch herself, once she’d struck at last what she’d sought. A touch of eternity and the scent of small prey.

She did not want to talk about how she crashed in the courtyard of the clinic in the Bamboo Forest, choking back tears and wailing (wailing!) for help.

Yamame Kurodani had no gods. That much had never changed. And yet, as she had reflected once, all the while she had faith. She believed in the predictable. The meshes between action and result. The anchors of consequence. The certainties of knowledge, gravity and time. The underpinning architecture of the world.

And so, in her faith, she had turned to the architects of the body.

And yet, she had no desire to mention – at any length – how she had been ejected from the clinic grounds no sooner than her human had been taken over by the crew. A nurse (or otherwise attendant) did emerge, hours afterwards – to find the earth spider curled, foetal, against the outer fence. The miracle-sciences of the Moon’s descended Sage would restore the human’s poison-wracked physiology, the nurse would say. The matter remaining had been the price.

Yamame’s had been a simple curse.

“Continue,” the Moon-doctor’s attendant had ordered. “To be what you are. To do what you do. My Master finds use in your existence. So… exist.”

Though there had been further words: of conditions, periods, laudation of the clinic’s master, a warning to stay away; but Yamame had only half-registered the flow of it, filing key-words away for later, while her spider’s heart wrapped itself in guilt.

Ahead too long still, the nurse had caught on to the _youkai_ ’s lethargy; she tapped the heels of her (when Yamame thought about them later) hauntingly familiar, cowhide booties, gave a wooden nod, and retreated back inside the clinic. The earth spider had spent the ensuing day and night in the self-same spot, stewing inside with regret and self-hate. Three more such nights, and the leaking fumes of her internal cookery would attract the Moon Sage’s clean-up detail.

The mother of plagues of now, Yamame Kurodani in the present, wanted to talk about none of this.

She was home.

This was the immediate state and care. The home had no floors, windows, nor roof (and no walls outside personality); but it was still, somehow, someway, her home. It was where she was rooted. She did not need a Black Valley or a Capital – new or old – anymore. All she needed was him. The heat of his body, his musky-scented skin, and the strong arms, whelmed safely about her smaller, female form.

That much was everything.

And for now, for a handful sweet moments more, it was all she ever wanted.

* * *

But Yamame Kurodani was a craftsman soul. And her standards only climbed higher.

An unhappy rumble murmured out of her human when she nudged that he ought to let her peel away. Two palm-spans were as far as she did; altogether not enough to fluster about. Still, it tickled her to see contrition darkening behind his wonderful eyes.

The tickle became corporeal when his odd compulsion to touch earth spiders reared its head once more. His dominant hand loosed from her back; it glided round to Yamame’s front, trailing up her flank, the side of her left breast, and the same of her neck. It cupped her cheek – warm, ink-stained, and rough as she had known it. Its thumb disengaged from its siblings. It rubbed along the earth spider’s lips.

The human owning it sighed.

Yamame could bear it no more. The nonsense melancholy set her to giggling. She sputtered her amusement under and around the finger kissing her mouth shut.

“You are a snake,” she managed to accuse her human. “Aren’t you? For all that calling me fat, why is it you can’t quit molesting my soft parts whenever they’re put inside your reach?”

“Because they feel good,” her human said, staid and sober (if still gloomy). “… Because you feel good.”

“You feel bonier,” she shot back.

That cracked his staidness. “… Yes,” he grunted. “Yes. Quite. Thanks ever-so for pointing it out.” He allowed his hand to flake from her face and re-join its mirror twin at her waist. “I was a month abed, and another three recovering. That eats away one’s reserves.”

“I’ll miss your reserves.” She said it without shame.

Her human’s chin swished side to side. “No,” he replied. “No. I’ll exercise. I’ll have to, anyway. When I start working for you again—”

“You will?”

The question startled him not least as much as it had startled its speaker.

“… Ye—Yes,” he released his answer at last. “Of… Of course. What else would I do? I’m not stacked right for accounting.”

Yamame’s tiny heart thudded in her chest.

_I love him,_ she thought, with thunder-strike lucidity. Though it might have been the heart speaking in this instance – but it made scant any matter to its master. _I love him. I love him. I really love him._

Lady Satori had been half-wrong; Yamame Kurodani _had_ loved her human, even before entirely resolving her _who._ She had loved him quietly, in spider-way; she had loved how he’d facilitated her passions to bud and bloom, how he had presented her with new, exotic foods, how he had travelled every odd week to give her ever more to do: more to read, more to build, more to learn. And then she’d begun to love him for how he – the fragile human he – had stridden past the trappings of her name, her titles and reputation, and treated the _youkai_ as what it had been under its irritable earth spider’s skin. A person. An artist. A woman.

A whit heavy one – when compared to some of her sisters – but one all the same.

She had _always_ loved him, much as “always” could compress to limit to their acquaintance. Only later had the great architect of the Underworld finessed what the term for her emotions actually was. Where it could lead. How it could develop. Like the project of a house: spanning from the simple floor-plan, out and out, until the walls were made real and the rooms inside fully furnished.

_I love him,_ her heart thumped stubbornly. Yamame could no more shush it than she could stop it from beating.

“… Not yet, though.”

Her human had spoken, oblivious of her inner heat. Yamame clutched at her wits.

She blew out a reply, wits evacuating together with her voice. “… What?”

Her human did not notice, or show he had. Or, perhaps, he had never reckoned wits were part of her composition.

“I am,” he explained, “I am going to work for you again, Yamame. Move back in with you, hopefully. But not yet.”

Yamame blinked. “… But I want it now,” she protested. “I want you to return with me. Today. I want to take you home.”

_To make it one,_ she added inside. _To make it smell like home. Like you._ There were other reasons – some more, some less wholesome – but the earth spider staunchly refused to name them. Her human was, at any rate, impermeable to her pleas – whatever the kind.

“… Mother is right,” he sighed. “Winter is near; and pox on them, but no one in town is thick enough to start building on frozen ground, under falling snow. And I… I am not my best, yet. The doctor said to handle myself gently for a while. Being with you… _Working_ with you is anything but.”

“I…” Yamame swallowed. No argument came back up – damningly. “… I believe.”

“Then you’ll listen to my mother?”

“Yes.” _I was going to, anyway._ “I will. No worries.”

Her human breathed out his relief. “Very good.”

And then, as though it were the natural thing to do, he leaned forward and kissed her.

And there it was. The circle. The familiar cadence with which her human’s conversation was cut – the rhythm of pain-pleasure-pain, and again – was manifesting. But this, too, was part of his own _who._ This was how he, in his human frailty, was perhaps stamping his own weaknesses. As he ever had.

The only change was, these days, the pleasure part had the pain outweighed by half.

That it was a change merited recognition. In the wings, other changes – blacker, less willing – were waiting in attendance; but Yamame Kurodani was a spider. Her mind demanded detail and focus. And so, she chose this. She chose this changed human, who would frown at her when she broke his kisses, as well when she broke his back under work. She chose him, who would nonetheless only watch when she picked one of his hands up from her waist and cradled it in her own. She chose him, who remained silent and trusting as she lightly brushed her lips on the hand’s ridgy top.

She had done far worse to him, yes… and far better. But this was ritual. This was important.

Yamame Kurodani peered up, smiling coyly as she did.

“Nice to meet you,” she said, “Naoto.”

* * *

**✱✱✱ HERE ENDS** _Kurodani Yamame Has No Gods_ **✱✱✱**

* * *


End file.
